Ideas Factory: Piercy & Co’s testing ground for materials, craftsmanship and new ways of thinking

“It’s a bit of a Soane trick,” Fiona Neil, one of the directors of Piercy & Co, notes by the elongated door to ‘Apartment 21’, “messing with your sense of spatial sequencing that you carry in your brain”. Think ‘playful working environment’ and it can conjure a headache of zany colours, squishy beanbags and aggressively cheery slogans on the wall. Thankfully, Apartment 21 or the ‘living gallery’ by award-winning architecture and interiors practice Piercy & Co has none of that.

Instead, the space anchors its approach to the business of design around a 14-seater dining table, exploring what it means to play both in and out of the office through a more grown-up lens. Ideas around neuroaesthetics are tossed around over seasonal dinners prepared by a chef for an eclectic mix of guests, from friends and suppliers to the frequent office party.

Previously used as a gallery-cum-living space, Apartment 21 has an elastic sense of being, shifting effortlessly between domestic and productive, and accommodating both the everyday and the unexpected. Built in the 1930s as a technical college, its architectural lineage can still be felt in the soaring, almost three-metre-high, west and south-facing Crittall windows, now framed by linen curtains from Yarn Collective.

Having lived upstairs, Stuart Piercy, founder and director of Piercy & Co, already knew the space well, albeit as a guest. “The former owner was a gallerist who used to put paintings up on the walls and sell them. He’d have the coolest parties,” he recalls. When the owner passed away, the apartment came up for sale and Stuart found himself in an informal interview with the owner’s relatives, who were keen for its artistic spirit to continue. “They were really against renting it out, but I said, ‘No, I have a plan to keep the gallery vibe going and use it as a workspace and for entertaining clients.’” The pitch worked and, during lockdown, the apartment changed hands, giving Stuart a place to work and retreat from the strange uncertainty of the time.

“I didn’t touch it for about six months,” he recalls. When things opened up again and work could start, the team saw no need to overhaul the essence of the floorplan. “Structurally it was all fine,” says Stuart. “We did do a few tweaks.” These included enlarging the bedroom and installing a new wall to wrap around the kitchen, while the white walls were retained, one of which is finished in polished plaster, to preserve the gallery feel. Today, an original piece by Sheila Girling hangs opposite the windows, while a Jess Allen painting, mirroring the gentle shadows created by the slim leaves of the dragon tree, sits behind the Sedilia sofa.

While the layout remained largely unchanged, the architectural interventions still pack a punch. A bold, circular glazed door, crafted by joinery specialists Benchmark, sections off the study. “Our buildings usually have a circle or a soft corner,” Stuart notes. “Usually if it’s a corridor that’s quite long, we’ll soften one side of it to get the light deeper into the plan.”

“It all developed quite slowly at first,” says Fiona, who, alongside her role as a director at the practice, is also Head of Interiors. “I think that was all developing around the same time as working on those curves in plan in the back corridor.”

The uncanny curvature that confuses and delights guests leads towards the bedroom, hidden behind a panelled door. Using dark paint and lowered ceiling heights, a short corridor winds around, only to reveal not a bedroom but a spotlighted plinth with a Velocity by Sean Madden figurine perched on top. This playful reconfiguration of expectations is one of the most pleasing aspects of the design for Fiona. “This is the fun thing about this space,” she says, smiling. “You can test things and see how to make things feel more spatially interesting and engaging.”

Back in the late afternoon light, shadows cast across the white-painted floor, Fiona recalls how rooted in conversation the space has always been. “It became particularly relevant during lockdown,” she remembers. “We were talking about all the things that we were missing from life, and one of those was coming together around a long table. That kind of connectedness is such an integral part of designing well.”

For Stuart, it was equally important. “It has definitely brought us closer to clients. It came out of a desire to bring people around a table to share ideas.” A large part of Apartment 21’s purpose however, is the practice’s 80-strong in-house team. “It feeds into the studio work because we’ve kind of got this canvas to experiment.” He goes on to say, “You have to make a space for creativity to happen because I don’t think you can be creative in a space that’s not inspiring.”

One of the current topics of conversation is the evolving science of neuroaesthetics and the psychological impact of natural materials and spatial perception. The apartment is an ideal laboratory for the practice to explore these ideas in action. “I think there are a lot of things we intuitively feel when we enter a space. Your subconscious and your physiology respond to it within the first 50 nanoseconds,” Fiona explains. “Your body works out if it feels comfortable or not. It all goes back to deep evolutionary times, when we were in that fight-or-flight response. That field is really interesting to us because it’s not taking away the design decisions that we make, it’s just showing why we’re making those decisions. It’s a synthesis of function with intuition.”

As Stuart pours coffee into Feldspar mugs, he notes, “There are so many brilliant makers in the UK who are quietly doing neuroaesthetics.” Yet even the simple pleasure of being surrounded by beautifully designed objects, made to last and crafted from natural materials, doesn’t guarantee them a permanent spot in the mercurial setting. “This is a dynamic space,” he smiles, bending down to point at the bolts beneath the dining table and demonstrating how easily even that can be dismantled and removed. “You see, everything can go.”