Inside Wonderland
Irenie Studio bought an abandoned Victorian townhouse and turned it into a space for creating and exhibiting design during its renovation (image: Jim Stephenson).
Arriving in De Beauvoir Square feels a bit like entering a children’s book. Victorian townhouses with roof gables shaped like whipped cream and honeycomb-shaped lattice windows circle around a communal garden with pink and yellow roses. “Shoes off,” interior designer Irenie Cossey says, as we enter a house on the corner and patter up the stairs behind her.
Cossey was drawn to the house’s fairytale whimsy when she purchased it in spring 2024. “The windows and the shadows, they just dance around the space,” she says, explaining that she decided to style the house around the theme of Alice in Wonderland. The house was near-derelict when she bought it, but Cossey immediately breathed life into it by inviting designer Rio Kobayashi to use the space as a temporary gallery and a winter market before the extensive renovation began. “Kasia was making popcorn using a cauldron made out of tinfoil and Flavia made hot apple juice with vodka,” Cossey remembers fondly, referring to collaborators Kasia Kempa and Flavia Brändle. “Around 1,600 people turned up over the course of two days.” Dubbed Onthesq, the project has become a mixture between a development company and a marketing platform, with designers continuing to showcase their work in the house until it is eventually sold.
Rio Kobayashi created a dining table made from doors, shelves and fireplaces salvaged from the site (image: Ellen Christina Hancock).
To thank Cossey for her generosity, Kobayashi created the Looking Glass Table, which is made from doors, shelves and fireplaces salvaged from the site. Four puddle-shaped glass tabletops are held up by fragments of light blue doors that have been angled to look like the hull of a boat. Textile artist Tomoyo Tsurimi also repurposed fabric from the house’s original curtains, alongside dead stock Kvadrat textiles, to make pieces for the space. Tsurimi created a gauzy shower curtain with criss-crossed slats of opaque fabric and curtains with loose weaves broken up by horizontal ribbons, each piece focused more on mimicking the effect of the house’s lattice windows than providing actual concealment. “[The design] is a bit anti-privacy,” Cossey says, describing how the first floor of the house has a toilet, a bathroom and a bedroom in close enough proximity for people to have conversations between the rooms. “There’s a window cut out of the shower which opens onto the garden – so what if someone can see in?”
Tomoyo Tsurimi made textiles for the house that were inspired by the shadows from the lattice windows (image: Ellen Christina Hancock).
Found objects on the site also provided inspiration for Cossey’s collaboration with glassware company J Hill Standard, with whom she created vases inspired by an 1880s milk bottle discovered during renovations. Mirroring Alice in Wonderland, the vases come in two sizes – tiny or huge – and have wide mouths that resemble trumpet horns. Inspired by the idea of moving chairs out of the way in order to make room for a ceilidh, Cossey further teamed up with Kempa and Brändle to create a chair that is suspended upside down from a beam. “Irenie is always drawing people with big feet,” Kempa says of Cossey. “So I thought the chair should also have this gesture.” Each of its legs, which were hand-crafted by furniture maker Michael Murphy, spindle downwards into thin ankles and rounded feet that resemble paws.
Cossey designed a broom and an upside down chair in collaboration with Kasia Kempa, Flavia Brändle and Michael Murphy (image: Jim Stephenson).
The design is tasteful enough for adults but fantastical enough for children, both of whom, Cossey hopes, will be happy living here one day soon. There’s a pink stairwell with monkey-tail banisters to slide down, but there’s also large yellow storage cabinets and a washing machine and dryer integrated into a red cupboard. There’s a small window near the roof that would leave Alice a convenient eyehole after growing to an enormous size, but which also lights up the staircase. In the garden, an emerald green door reveals a drinks cabinet fit for cocktail parties, and children can spy through an oversized keyhole in the kitchen door to share in their revelry.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown