Interior Designers in London
Studio November is an interior design and architectural studio working on homes across London from our base in Oxford — an hour from the capital, and in it as often as our projects need us. Founders Samin Sahabi and Christopher Cooke trained and built their careers in London's design world before founding the studio; London is where our approach was formed. We design complete renovations of Victorian and Georgian townhouses, mansion flats, mews houses and period conversions — combining interior design and architectural design in one studio, from first drawings and consent applications through joinery, lighting and finishes to the final styled room.
Interior Design For London Homes
London houses ask a particular set of questions. Townhouses stack their living over four or five floors, and the difference between a house that works and one that doesn't is almost always the plan: where the kitchen sits, how the stair is used, whether the lower ground floor is a destination or a corridor. Mansion flats and lateral apartments trade the stairs for long internal hallways and rooms that need light borrowed from somewhere. And a large share of the city's period stock is listed or in a conservation area, where every alteration has to be argued for. Because we design architecture as well as interiors, we resolve these problems at the root rather than decorating around them — reorganising layouts, designing bespoke joinery that earns back the storage London floorplans never allow, and planning lighting for rooms that face a light well rather than a garden. The interior scheme is then built on a plan that works: finishes, fabrics and furniture selected to sit naturally with the building's age and the way you actually live.
​
Our completed London work includes full renovations in Richmond and Southwark — among them a Grade II listed townhouse taken through Listed Building Consent and delivered to completion — alongside projects across the city and clients who split their time between London and the country.
Areas we cover
We work across the capital, with most of our projects in London's period neighbourhoods:
-
Richmond
-
St Johns Wood
-
Chelsea
-
Kensington and Notting Hill
-
Fulham
-
Hampstead
-
Islington
-
Southwark and the villages of south-west London.
We're equally at home in a Grade II listed terrace and a lateral apartment in a mansion block, and we take on projects throughout Greater London and the commuter counties between London and Oxford — Henley, Marlow and the Chilterns included.
Many of our clients move in the other direction too: Londoners renovating a second home in Oxfordshire or the Cotswolds, who want one studio that can look after both. Our Oxford base makes that unusually practical — see our Cotswolds page for that side of the practice.
Listed buildings and conservation areas in London
London's boroughs contain thousands of listed buildings and some of the most closely protected conservation areas in the country, from the Georgian squares of Islington and Southwark to the stucco terraces of Kensington and the riverside villages of Richmond. Internal alterations to a listed house require Listed Building Consent from the borough, and each conservation team applies national policy with its own emphasis.
​
This is the ground where our architectural training matters most. We prepare the drawings, heritage statements and specifications that borough applications require, and we design proposals conservation officers can support — precise about what is historic fabric to be kept and what is later alteration that can be improved. Our Southwark townhouse project went through exactly this process: a Grade II listed building redesigned, consented and completed without losing what made it worth listing in the first place. Nineteen years across period and listed properties means we know what will be approved, what will be resisted, and how to design something better than the compromise you were braced for.
