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Urban retreat A quietly crafted development aimed at east London’s creative community
Urban retreat
A quietly crafted new development, set between a city farm and a busy high street in east London
Words / Nell Card Images / Courtesy of The Modern House
Hide is a residential development in East London – a collection of contemporary apartments set across two blocks at the corner of Haggerston Park. Followers of estate agent The Modern House will have seen the sales particulars appear in their inbox: the images show a quietly crafted, tactile environment that is both warm and raw. The Modern House introduced eight of the apartments in October 2019; the ninth – a top-floor duplex – has already sold, to the developer, Jonathan Ellis, and his partner, Sophie Smith, who is also Hide’s interior architect and designer, and works under the name Scenesmith.
Ellis established his company in 2012, but Hide is the first project to launch since the firm rebranded as Artform in April 2019. “Our previous name didn’t stand for anything,” Ellis reflects. “As a company, we had been going further and further towards the design-led side of things and taking more risks as we moved on. ‘Art’ was a word that we kept coming back to. We are art lovers, but we also feel that our buildings are more comparable to art than property. Form is structure, so when you put the two words together – Artform – it made sense of what we do as a design-led company.”
Smith, who has a background in architecture, had been working with Artform when it went through its rebranding, and her vision has helped to redefine its approach to property development. “As a couple, we get to push the boundaries,” she explains. “We challenge each other with the design and what we think is right for the space.” Ellis adds that “Hide has become our first opportunity to do something special and we’re happy for it to be different.”
At the start of the project, Smith produced a design document – a set of ideas and intentions that would steer the internal aesthetic. That document remained unchanged throughout the build. The two brick blocks on Hackney Road, designed by architects Manalo & White, sit either side of a listed former church, St Augustine’s: working around views of the city in one direction, and of Hackney City Farm in the other, Smith sought inspiration from what she calls “the juxtaposition of rural urbanity.”
This plays out in the material choices, where concrete ceilings meet unpainted plasterwork, and the peach of the cherry veneer on the bespoke joinery is picked up in the coloured flecks on the rubber floor. “There is an appetite for the unusual and the considered, particularly in an area like Hackney, which is home to an incredible community of makers and artisans,” says Smith. Her aim from the start was to weave that community into the fabric of Hide, “to really ground it in its location”.
For both Ellis and Smith, the premise of a mundane show home with high-gloss kitchens and grey carpets “doesn’t sit well”. Instead, one completed apartment (whose design will be replicated across the rest of the units) has been furnished with locally made or reimagined items “that have already lived a couple of lifetimes,” says Smith. The terrazzo vanity units, for example, are from Altrock, a company based in Leytonstone that hand-forms each slab using marble off-cuts that would otherwise go to waste. The flooring is made from carbonneutral natural rubber, the legs of the glasstopped coffee table have been fashioned from old clay chimney pots, and even the candles are made from recycled wax. For Smith, all this “adds richness to the scheme”.
There is a deliberate honesty to many of the other elements, too. “You can read the way the fittings have been constructed – the way they hold themselves up,” she explains, referencing the load-bearing breezeblocks of the vanity unit and the visible framework of the joinery – the result of “hundreds” of design meetings between Smith and Soroush Pourhashemi, Previous page Hide’s apartments are filled with many carefully crafted objects, including a wall hanging by Christabel Balfour and Danish midcentury furniture
Facing page The bespoke kitchen was made by local company Lozi, which supplied joinery throughout the development
founder of Lozi, a design studio based a stone’s throw from Hide that specialises in minimal, modern wooden furniture. “Our studio is so close, we were able to walk our pieces over in around two minutes,” says Pourhashemi. Each of the apartments is fitted with bespoke Lozi kitchens, pantries and wardrobes. In the bedrooms, the wardrobes also function as a room divider and feature a strokably smooth curve that brings softness to what Pourhashemi calls “this semi-finished environment”.
The quietly crafted Hide aesthetic is the result of a respectful build process and hours of
research, right down to the details. The couple recall a three-hour session in the Bloomsbury branch of Oxfam, scouring the shelves for the right books to dress the apartment with. “That wasn’t an arduous process for us,” explains Ellis. “There are so many reasons why it made sense: it’s charitable, for starters. And the books have already been printed – we aren’t having to buy new.” Appropriately enough, the second-hand books now sit on a shelving system made from recycled newspaper by Dutch designers Studio Woojai. What if the eventual buyers decide they don’t want either? “We’ll just move them upstairs to our flat.”
Above The curving wardrobe leads the eye around the corner into the bedroom, and also acts as a room divider
Above Top to bottom: a scalloped headboard brings a gentle three-dimensionality to the bedroom; the bathroom uses Altrock, made from offcuts of marble
Following page Raw, unpainted plaster walls contrast with home comforts such as thick rugs. The chimney-pot coffee table and wool artwork were designed by Scenesmith
