Living with Timber

Written by Omar Dahabra

Location: London, United Kingdom
Year: 2025
Architects: EBBA
Photography by: Felix Speller

Living with Timber: Home of EBBA director Benni Allan

This project is an essay in the appreciation and enjoyment of working and living with timber. As well as serving as a new home for EBBA’s Director, Benni Allan, the renovation of the apartment has been about testing design solutions and creating a place with all the ideas that are often let go of during the design process (for many reasons). A place imagined as live-come-showspace, with the intention of creating a home as somewhere to live around objects that constantly change. Objects collected as well as those from friends and collaborators, to be displayed in a gallery-like setting that offers the opportunity to continue developing ideas and exploring how we interact with the things that we live with.

An example of the experimental quality of the project is the use of douglas fir throughout, including walls, floors and joinery. The installation, testing and finishing of the materials was carried out to investigate how best to use cost effective materials so they can last. In combination with found materials, parts of the project were built using re-claimed elements such as the mahogany parquet taken from a mews project of EBBA’s that would otherwise have been discarded. The arrangement is a large open-plan kitchen and living that conceals all of the workings of a kitchen behind large cupboards. This large piece of furniture also addresses the sharp angle to the original building, helping to provide ample storage and retain the calmness brought by the raw plaster surfaces and warm timber.

The main bedroom opens up to the kitchen through a full height sliding door where borrowed light fills the space. A study connected from the corridor doubles as a place to make, often filled with other discarded materials that are soon to become more experiments. Lastly, the project offered the chance to make new objects and items that are part of Benni’s interest in furniture and music. A stacked coffee table acts as centre-piece and is part of a new collection the studio is developing, while a one-of-a-kind speaker (also in douglas fir) designed with Friendly Pressure and Our Department are a key addition that completes the home... for now. Text description by the architects.

Source: www.eb-ba.co

Omar Dahabra
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