Golf Links Residence

The entrance was a dark dogleg corridor lined with shoe cabinets. We removed everything, widened the opening by a single course of brick, and let the passage become a small gallery — bone lime plaster taken by hand up to a lime-washed ceiling, a travertine threshold set flush with the oak floor.

One picture light, warm and low. A stone plinth for whatever the family is currently living with. Nothing else. It sets the register for the rest of the home: you slow down before you have decided to.

North light is the apartment's best material, so the seating sits low and away from the windows to keep the glazing clear. The long wall is oiled Burma teak, detailed as a single continuous piece of cabinetry — books, records, a drinks niche — with shadow gaps instead of handles.

There is no ceiling light. The room is lit entirely from the floor and from three adjustable picture lights, each dimmed to the level of a reading lamp. In the evening the teak holds the last of the warmth and the paintings are the brightest things in the room.

One decision carries the room: a 3.4-metre table in a single slab of reclaimed Indian rosewood, hand-planed and finished with oil rather than lacquer so it will mark and mellow. It seats ten without extension and looks correct with two.

The brass pendant above it is deliberately underpowered — wired to sit at candlelight and never asked to do more. Storage is a low run of the same teak as the living room, so the two rooms read as one idea seen twice.

We treated the bedroom as a cell — a room for one purpose. The headboard wall is upholstered floor to ceiling in undyed tussar silk, which absorbs sound and softens the morning glare off the neighbouring terrace. Curtains are a heavy wool, lined for full black-out.

The dressing area is pulled into a short corridor of fluted oak that connects the bedroom to the bath, lit by a continuous slot at the ceiling. You pass through it in the dark without needing a switch.

The barsati — the traditional rooftop room — had become a store for broken furniture. We rebuilt it with slim steel windows on three sides and left it almost empty: a writing table, a daybed, a rug that can take bare feet in winter sun.

In kite season the whole sky above Golf Links fills with paper. The room was designed around that view and very little else.