Spatial Awareness

Interior designer Katie McCrum reworked the layout of this once-stuffy apartment and gave it a chic new look

- Serena Fokschaner

The Edwardian mansion block was the height of modernity when it was first built. The wide spaces, lifts and 24-hour porterage appealed to the professional classes, who also appreciated the central city location. By the Seventies, however, these dwellings had fallen from fashion. Their traditional layout of a corridor flanked by a separate kitchen and dining room seemed out of sync with the shift towards brighter, more open-plan living.

Yet as Tom and Antonia Game will testify, fashions have a habit of coming full circle. ‘Since we came back from Hong Kong, we’ve lived in Surrey, and we wanted a second home in central London,’ says Tom, a corporate lawyer. ‘It had to be a place with enough room for us to be together as a family but where our grown-up children could also have their own space.’