London interiors are usually a conversation with a building that already exists — Victorian, Georgian, often listed, frequently darker than anyone would like.
Period house renovations, flat conversions, and workspace and hospitality fit-outs.
Light is the scarce resource for much of the year, so the palette has to work in grey daylight and in lamplight, which are very different problems. Warm, tactile materials do more here than cool reflective ones. Original mouldings, joinery and fireplaces are worth keeping and working around. Damp and thermal performance in old buildings need breathable finishes — lime rather than sealed systems — or the fabric suffers.
Listed-building consent and planning permission set the boundaries and take time. Sequencing design around approvals rather than assuming them is the difference between a smooth project and a stalled one.
Working across a distance is exactly where BIM earns its keep. The project is modelled and coordinated in three dimensions before anything is ordered, so joinery, services and finishes are resolved against one another rather than on site, quantities come off the model, and a local contractor can build from drawings that leave nothing to interpretation.
NYKS is a turnkey studio: the same people who draw the room are accountable for the room that gets built — design, artisan commissioning, procurement, site execution and handover. We do not take styling-only engagements. More about the studio and how it works is on the about page.
Where a project needs them, we bring in specialists by niche — a landscape designer when the garden is part of the architecture, a lighting designer when the room depends on how it is lit, MEP consultants so services are engineered rather than accommodated, and IT and AV consultants where the space has to be genuinely intelligent. Their work is coordinated in BIM against ours, so everything agrees on the drawing before it has to agree on site.
Through BIM and resolved documentation. The room is modelled in three dimensions and coordinated before work starts, so the specification a local contractor receives is unambiguous. Site presence is scheduled around the decisive stages rather than spread thin.
Yes. The approach is to keep what has aged well — mouldings, joinery, fireplaces — and let new work read as new rather than imitate the original.
By testing the palette in both grey daylight and lamplight, which behave very differently, and leaning on warm tactile materials rather than cool reflective ones.
Very. Lime-based finishes let old fabric manage moisture; sealed modern systems can trap it and cause damage.
Comfortably, when it is one considered element rather than a theme. That tension between restraint and a made object is the studio’s whole method.