Photography by Maja Bulkowska
The study faces north. Walls, ceiling, doors and library are painted in Farrow & Ball's Brinjal, one of the darkest shades in the palette. A dark colour in a dim room runs against every textbook rule, yet here the scarcity of light turned into the room's strength: the study is enveloping and quiet, and has become everyone's favourite room. The bespoke library is painted in the same Brinjal, so the joinery melts into the walls. At its centre sits a De Gournay Jardinières Citrus Trees panel, hand-painted and hand-embroidered on silk, made to order. In front of the sofa, a vintage coffee table with star marquetry, found in Opole. Pink silk curtains, made by the Warsaw atelier Krawiec Wnętrz, frame the windows. The room is entered through glazed double doors set on its axis, a nod to the studies of old, where large axial doors marked the importance of the room.
Many grand pre-war apartments once had an oriental room, a place for things brought back from long journeys: bamboo, lacquer, painted silk, landscapes from the other side of the world. The bedroom is a nod to that tradition. On the wardrobe doors, pines lean over a distant bay under a pink sky. This is Osborne & Little's Coastline, applied to the timber wardrobe, so that a large run of storage becomes the room's picture rather than its weight. The tall scalloped headboard, upholstered in Dedar by the Warsaw workshop Mebeltap, echoes the pink of the wallpaper. Walls and joinery are painted in Farrow & Ball's French Gray, and a new herringbone parquet replaced the plastic panels left by an earlier renovation.
The kitchen was designed around the owner's longed-for La Canche range. Beside it hangs her diploma from Le Cordon Bleu in London. The ceiling is papered in small stars, a nod to the navy, star-strewn vault of the church in Złaków Kościelny, in the Łowicz region where the designer comes from. In a home full of English references, it is this ceiling that speaks of Polish roots.
The bath sits beneath an arch that continues the motif from the hall. The bespoke vanity is painted in Farrow & Ball’s Parma Grey, with a stone top by the Mapstone workshop and Beata Heuman’s bow handles. In the powder room, the walls are papered in Dedar, and the stone floor was made by Mapstone to the studio’s design.
