Columbia Road is best known for its Sunday flower market. The East End’s taste for cut flowers is usually traced to the Huguenots who settled here after 1685, and the market moved from Saturday to Sunday to suit the area’s Jewish traders, which also let Covent Garden and Spitalfields sellers clear their Saturday stock.

Close by stood Columbia Market, opened in 1869 by the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts: a Gothic Revival hall by Henry Darbishire, built so that costermongers could trade off the street. It never drew the trade it was built for, closed as a market in 1886 and was demolished around 1960. The terraces around it survived: modest mid-nineteenth-century houses built for the artisans and traders who defined the neighbourhood’s early character.

This house is one of them – reworked by owners who work as creative directors. A deep green door opens to a hall of original boards and bespoke joinery, where Charlotte Perriand’s Applique à Volet Pivotant wall lights for Nemo sit beneath a roof light. The living space beyond is broad and well proportioned, lit by tall shuttered sashes onto Columbia Road, with a reclaimed stone fireplace at either end.

At the rear, the kitchen is the owners’ own design: cabinetry in solid cherry by Neil Ramshaw of NHR Joinery, a member of the Guild of Master Craftsmen, with worktops in Italian marble, hand-glazed tiles from C. Emery and a floor of leathered Portuguese travertine. The roof above is fully glazed, and bespoke floor-to-ceiling Crittall doors open onto a courtyard of tree ferns and acers.

Upstairs, a former third bedroom has become a bathroom of unexpected volume, a clawfoot bath set on wide timber boards among Bert & May tiles in chalky tones, with taps and bathware by Lefroy Brooks.

The house is Victorian at the front and something closer to Los Angeles at the back, where the kitchen gives onto the garden. Its owners had already brought twentieth-century design into period rooms, which made it a natural setting for The Neuter.

Sergio Colussi founded The Neuter in London in 2020. It is a small online gallery of collectible lighting, weighted towards post-war Italy: Gae Aulenti, Vico Magistretti, Elio Martinelli, Achille Castiglioni and Bruno Munari among them. Sergio has no showroom, and the collection lives online.

Placing the lamps in a lived-in house, rather than a studio, was the point of the collaboration. It is also how we work: we style the homes we represent with artists and designers, and with dealers such as Sergio, so that a house is seen with objects equal to its architecture.

Aulenti is best remembered for turning a Parisian railway terminus into the Musée d’Orsay, but she worked across architecture, furniture, lighting and the stage. Her approach was to read what a place already held, its structures and its history, and to build from there.

La Torre comes out of her long partnership with the theatre director Luca Ronconi. She designed it as part of the scenography for Ronconi’s production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s La Torre (The Tower), and Martinelli Luce put it into production in 1978. It is a tall, spare object: a black steel stem that kinks at a turned timber grip, then rises in a single arc to a smoked green shade. In the front reception it stands beside Jan Vaněk’s bentwood armchairs with their woven seats, under a paper lantern. For a lamp made for the stage, it is quiet in a room.

Martinelli founded Martinelli Luce in Lucca in 1950 and spent the following decades working through light as geometry: domes and globes, made in new materials and resolved with care. Flag is late in that line. By 1982 Ettore Sottsass and Memphis had turned Milanese design towards colour and ornament, and Flag holds its ground against them: a single white tube, cut on the diagonal at its end, pivoting on a slim upright above a round base. Here it sits under the roof light on a Hans J. Wegner credenza, its oak top above doors of woven cane: Danish and Italian modernism meeting on one surface.

Little is recorded about Laura Mandelli beyond her training as an architect in Milan and two lamps: one for the Spanish company La Creu, and Cirillo for iGuzzini. Cirillo was designed as a bedside lamp. A clear acrylic cylinder carries a white dome, and inside it an angled aluminium screen, cut with fine parallel slots, lets out enough light to read by without glare. On the bedroom mantelpiece, beside a framed work on paper, it gives the room a low, warm light at the end of the day.

Through the week, Columbia Road is a quiet street of small galleries and independent shops. On Sunday mornings the market fills it from end to end. Brawn and Campania are a few doors along, and Redchurch Street and Broadway Market are each a short walk away. Haggerston Park is the nearest green space, with London Fields a little further north.

Columbia Road never reached the portals. After its first day of viewings we accepted an offer from a retained buyer, a familiar face from our East London network. This is how many of the properties within our portfolio are matched, and how we prefer to work. La Torre, Flag and Cirillo are available to buy directly from Sergio at The Neuter.

Photography: Martyna Wlodarska.
Lighting: The Neuter.