A Cinematic Frame
 

Entering this home feels like stepping into a vivid memory — a suspended dimension where time slows and spaces breathe with personal history and quiet reverie. It unfolds like a slowed-down film: each room a carefully composed frame, each object a quiet cue in a narrative of soft drama and romantic restraint. Borrowing the measured tempo of European salons and gently laced with whispers of chinoiserie, it forms a lived-in mise-en-scène where time feels languid, deliberate, and richly textured. This isn’t a home that performs; it invites you in, holding your gaze with quiet, unhurried intensity.

 

Romanticism in Construction
 

The interior breathes with a gentle rhythm — rises and rests weaving through space like a whispered melody. Chevron oak flooring hums softly beneath fluted mouldings and sculpted cornices, recalling the delicate grace of Parisian salons long past. Off-white chalky walls cradle a vast, unfolding palette — plush velvet that invites touch, marbles swirling with stories in their veins, oxidised oak glowing with quiet age, and brushed steel shimmering like distant starlight. Each material and colour was gathered thoughtfully, as if collected from dreams and memories, layered with care to compose a tender romance where softness lingers in harmonious balance with form and scale.

 

A Monument to Gesture
 

Anchoring the living room is a custom console in honed Calacatta Viola Black — a horizontal fireplace reimagined as sculpture. Blending the presence of a traditional mantel with the form of a modern TV console, it unites old and new, softened by subtle fluted marble pilasters that root the design in classical restraint. Inspired by Adolf Loos, ornamentation is measured and never overwhelms. Concealed compartments hold digital essentials, while the top surface serves as both display and threshold. The console stands as a tactile anchor — sculptural, silent, and a poised gesture in the home’s unfolding narrative.

 

Surreal Interruptions
 

Above the sofa, two paintings by Madeleine McKinlay — Chill Out Session and Lemonade — disrupt the tonal calm with dreamlike urgency. Saturated, sun-warped, and distorted in perspective, they channel playful surrealism into the space, serving as a chromatic counterpoint to the material restraint. These artworks act as cinematic cuts — vibrant emotional interludes punctuating the room’s shadowed stillness. McKinlay’s subtly skewed perspectives and rich hues evoke a dreamlike parallel of domesticity — a world where reality gently drifts into memory, mirroring the homeowners’ quiet longing to while away their days in sun-drenched sand and sea along a European coast — a tender daydream captured on canvas — a conversation between mood and memory.


The Poetics of Stillness
 

Every object holds a sculptural breath — a glass table poised on a neoclassical column, an antique bronze lamp leaning just so, a table set in candlelight, suspended like a still from a dream. These moments don’t merely exist; they unfold softly, like frames in a lingering film. Here, the space lives between tension and repose, memory and modernity, romance and surrealism. It is not silence but a languid stillness — rich with light, time, and feeling — where harmony whispers in the hush.​​​

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