Composite Index

Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton behind their London home.

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Kirsty’s favorite space in the house is the living room, where she and her girlfriends curl up on the sectional sofa to gossip over a glass of wine.

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With the sliding doors open, the kitchen connects to a courtyard and spare bedroom, where friends who come over for dinner sometimes take up residence for days.

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The kitchen table.

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Bruce and Kirsty loved the idea of a kitchen island rather than traditional work surfaces around the walls. Bruce fancies himself a chef and hates to have his back to everyone when he’s cooking. This island, from the Boffi LT line designed by Piero Lissoni, allows guests to gather around for impromptu sushi rolling or casual breakfasts.

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If tidiness is paramount for the family, a place for the kids to play outdoors is equally important. The climbing wall at the back of the garden is entirely the work of Mark Tiarks, who built the Composite House and who relished a chance to step out from beneath Tozer’s plans and design an aspect of the house himself.

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Bruce worried about what to put in the double-height space above the kitchen table—–until he found these Tom Dixon–designed mirror balls. “They were installed at random and when William came over that evening, he said, ‘Fantastic, well done.’ So we left them like that.”

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Bruce is a wine enthusiast and a stickler for efficiency, so this prefab concrete cellar with an ingenious passive ventilation system was a natural choice. It maintains a constant temperature, and its stacked horizontal bins can store up to 1,400 bottles of wine—–a good excuse to keep adding to the collection.

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Blond Dinesen Douglas-fir floorboards stretch the length of the house, framing its clean planes and lines. The stairs, which cantilever out from the house’s original bare brick walls, are mounted on brackets and made from the same material. The house and Dinesen itself are well matched: Both are just over a century old.

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Bruce and Kirsty are obsessively tidy, so copious storage was a must. An entire wall in their bathroom opens to reveal a cabinet that is exactly the depth of a fat roll of toilet paper, and one of their kitchen cupboards was specially fireproofed in order to house that dastardly appliance, the toaster.

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