Words Sophie Sims
Photography French + Tye

“We’d been living nearby – I’d often run past the building,” says Jaime. “But we booked to view the apartment, not realising it was here – it all felt very serendipitous.” And the coincidences have continued – “Sometimes, we’ll have a delivery driver who was a student at the school before it was converted,” adds Matt.

The exacting, piecemeal renovation was left less to chance. The couple tried and tested different designs before landing on its present, luminescent form. A cut-back mezzanine, carved-out office and two new staircases later, the pair are proud of their fine-tuning. “Sometimes we’d make a big change and say, ‘This is what it should have been all along. Thank God we looked at it again!” Matt exclaims. “Self-projects have their own challenges: they can become kind of an obsession.”

Jaime Hepburn: “We’d initially viewed another flat in the building and were almost talked into looking at this one – it was in really bad shape. We walked in, saw how it was, and left – but we were both secretly thinking that we liked it and could see the potential.

“We got a drink afterwards, and one of us eventually said, ‘Look, it’s in an absolutely shocking state, but do you think we should do it?’ When we finally moved in in 2018, we wanted to live in it before we committed to changing things: it was really nice to have had that, to be able to see where the light hits.”

Matt Hepburn: “We left London for a few years after – the architecture firm in London I was working for at the time opened an office in California, so we went with them. We’d always talked about moving somewhere else before we had children, so it seemed like a great opportunity. The work I did out there definitely had some influence over the work here.

“Use of light was influential and had been one of the things that we were most excited about when we found this place. It has these four huge windows – some facing north, others west – meaning that the light develops across the day, and the entire atmosphere of the space shifts from morning to evening.

“With the material decisions, we kept everything tonally light. The pale countertops and plywood in the kitchen bring warmth while letting the natural light from the windows run all the way into the depth of the plan. The kitchen before had been a dark veneer that made the space feel so small.

“One of the biggest things we did was cut back the mezzanine where the bed is now and put in a staircase to reveal one of the windows that had been previously cut in half. Where we sleep now feels like it’s double-height, even though we’re only in the top part of it. It's completely open, but we love it that way.

“The idea of carving out spaces is very intentional in the design: dividing between family space and private space. The ground floor is so open that there’s almost a straight line of sight from the front door into the kitchen and living room.

“The spare bedroom has a discreet door that some people don’t even notice until we point it out, and the office, which we added, has been a surprisingly wonderful space. When one of us is working from home, we can peek our head over the balustrade and say 'hello' when the other brings our son, Milo, home from nursery. It’s both separate and a part of the house.”

Jaime: “Milo was born in 2023, a year and a bit after we finished the renovation. We were so worried about how white everything was at first! But we sort of just figured it out. Adding little elements of colour was important to us, otherwise, you risk things being a little too beige.”

Matt: “The material palette of the building is a background for life and the everyday, it has character without being domineering. We added colour with furnishings and artwork throughout the house, which means that whoever ends up living here can breathe their own life into it."

Jaime: “Another big thing for us was storage: I’m Canadian, and we have a lot of storage space in our houses. The beauty of doing a project like this is that you can find clever ways to make storage in interesting nooks and crannies.

“We found these unusual recesses: rather than plaster-boarding over them, we decided to make the most of them: like the space we have in the kitchen for the wine glasses. We created lots of niches to put things in, which is great as we travel a lot and tend to buy things when we visit new places.

“Everything we’ve done here is influenced by the other. Matt has heavily inspired the yoga studios, and our home has been inspired by the free-from-clutter principles of the studio. If everything has a place and is decluttered, you feel at ease: here, we’ve integrated this kind of thinking to create calm and make sure that things are drawn back and relaxed.”