Dukes Galaxy

In the den the argument is at its clearest. The banquette is a steel rail; what makes it a seat is the row of cushions strapped to it in leather — blue, ivory, blue, ivory, a strict alternation that gives the hard frame its rhythm. An overdyed rug covers most of the stone floor and warms everything standing on it. And the still life on the cart table is deliberately casual: an open book, an apple, a plate of watermelon. A room this industrial persuades only when something in it looks interrupted.

Nothing hung on these walls was chosen to decorate them. The painting above the console carries the wall's own copper, rust and grey, so that panel and canvas read as one surface at two scales. The console beneath holds a lamp, a stack of books and a bowl — three objects, not ten — because a vignette in front of a wall this rich has to know when to stop.

The bedrooms take the same shell in opposite directions. The first is monochrome: a whitewashed plank headboard on a black wall, bedding kept to bone and oat, and above it a woodcut of tree rings — timber answering timber. Symmetry does the calming; the pothos beside the bed is the only thing allowed to move. The second bedroom is permitted colour, but only what the artwork above it permits: sage and blush, lifted straight from the panels into the bedding. On the nightstand, a radio on a stack of books and an apple — the room's one red.

Between two doors, the fireplace nook needed almost nothing. One leather butterfly chair. A cream throw dropped across it. A small black table with a bowl and two books. The chair angled toward the stove turns a passage into a place to sit — and the throw is what makes you believe someone does.

The dressing table is set the way the whole house is styled: few objects, common materials, careful spacing. Baskets and cream jugs on open shelves, a bowl or two, and white chrysanthemums in a glass compote on a woven mat. Nothing rare, nothing precious. The luxury is in the spacing.