Apartment Arabescato: grafted Architect’s Ode to Marble

Partners in life and practice, Nicole Fassihi and Lemma Redda made their debut as grafted architects with Cast Corbel House, a kitchen extension that celebrated the materiality of the red brick used on the rear façade, winning them a prestigious RIBA award and was featured on House of the Year. Now increasingly recognised as a craft-led studio, grafted has turned its focus to marble in their Fitzrovia-based follow-up project, Apartment Arabescato.

When the need for more space arose, rather than moving to a larger home, grafted’s clients, a family of five, bought the apartment below theirs in DSDHA’s Corner House, completed in 2016, with the aim of creating a duplex designed to future-proof their families needs. 

We sat down with Nicole and Lemma to understand why they favour a hands-on approach, the perils of transporting a hot tub through central London and heart-stopping work of cutting up marble slabs.

Lemma: We’re not joiners but there was a big interest in digital fabrication and the idea behind the practice at the start, was that we could use those kinds of technologies to facilitate and enable architects to do more of the work on site themselves. By fabricating things and installing them yourself, you can manage the process from start to finish. We just picked up skills along the way and there were lots of lessons learned.

Nicole: I think how it all bleeds together is the level of ambition or imagination that we would have for the next projects wouldn’t be the same had we not had that hands-on experience, particularly looking at something like the freestanding desk at the top of the penthouse, it’s such an awkward space that you would never really think you could fit something in there. But we have more of that confidence now, to know what’s possible and how to use those digital fabrication techniques and then working with highly skilled joiners on site.

Lemma: It was a connection through my previous office. I used to work at DSDHA, who were the original architect for the scheme. It was a very welcome email from the associate who’d led that project from the architectural side. Essentially they were too busy and they put us in touch with Bruno (the client), who was happy to move forward with us. They showed amazing faith in us. 

Nicole: It’s interesting because although they’re living in a penthouse in such a central location, their story is so relatable. So many people have experienced the same thing; they wanted to find a way to stay in the area and the community they were connected to.

They have three children who attend local schools. They love where they are living, but the children need rooms of their own. They first approached us looking for a feasibility study to purchase the apartment below and then knock through and connect it via a staircase.

Lemma: Kind of inverse loft conversion.

Nicole: Part of the brief was to save what we could in terms of the existing fittings and not to just rip everything out and start again, which I suppose would always be tempting with budgets. I think that was interesting and it kind of informed the approach in terms of setting what the material part would be.

Lemma: It was quite easy to pick up some of the themes in the apartment and try to celebrate them and work with them while still in a very quiet, sensitive, restrained way and to work with what they already had.

Lemma: We were led by what the building wanted. We could have had a big atrium, but that would have meant hoisting loads of steelwork up. And when you think about licenses to alter, working within our buildings, and all the work around tenure, there’s a lot of legalities, and it gets very complex. Overall, we had a very good set of handover information and based on what we could gather for the project, we took advice. 

It’s one of those things where listening to what the building wants is equally important, because it ends up being a better project in the end.

Lemma: It was convenient for us to get to!

Nicole: But then, the hot tub and having to close the road…

Lemma: The contractor had a lot to deal with. It was nice because life has gotten a bit more suburban these days for a lot of people. We quite often work in those areas, so going once every two weeks on site in Central London, it was really nice to feel the hustle and get a sense of what real people do when they live there.

Lemma: I’m a strong believer that once the material’s set and you’ve got a palette, you go big or you go home. If marble slabs are going to be used, they should get all the attention they deserve.

For a space that’s geometrically unorthodox, you can see in the early renders of the kitchen—and then in the actual outcome—that the marble was digitally placed so we knew exactly how it would look before it was installed.

I think that’s essential. Maximizing the material and the fabrication process is key. Architecture students around the world know how to lay out sheet materials and draw what they’ll cut with digital machines. It’s essentially the same process—you’re drawing on a slab, with more variation and complexity, but at its core, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and then getting people to put the pieces together.

Thanks to Nicole and Lemma for taking time to speak to us.