Bergman Design House Turns a London Apartment Into a Living Archive

An international family commissioned Bergman Design House to create a second home in London with refined, personal, enduring ambitions. The 4000 sqft listed residence was organized around the logic of a collection, treating objects as meaningful over decades rather than as decoration. Materials were selected for how they change with use, including travertine, whose pores collect light and whose variation becomes clearer as surfaces wear. Furnishings included a bar cabinet that preserves botanical matter in resin, and a geometric wall installation that holds attention through depth and repeated viewing. Custom joinery and stonework connected the home to London craft networks, while bespoke plasters, natural marquetry, and hand-painted wall coverings were chosen for tactile beauty and graceful aging.

"The London studio co-founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund, organized the 4000 sqft listed residence around the logic of the collection rather than the logic of decoration. While decoration fills a space, a collection builds over time, and the objects in this apartment were selected for their capacity to mean more in twenty years than they do today."

"Take travertine, for example, which improves with use. The stone's open pores collect light differently as surfaces wear, and the material's inherent variation becomes more legible over years of contact. It is one of a small category of materials that rewards the passage of time rather than resisting it, and Bergman Design House built an entire apartment around this principle."

"For the furnishings, Marcin Rusak's bar cabinet - his practice suspends botanical matter, flowers and plant material, within resin - is an object whose surface contains a kind of preserved time. The three-dimensional wall installation by Swiss studio Beyond works through geometry and depth, holding attention across repeated encounters in a way that purely visual objects do not."

"Bespoke plasters and natural marquetry cover the walls - both chosen, in Soliman's framing, for tactile beauty and the ability to age gracefully. Fromental's hand-painted wall coverings introduce a layer that only a human hand could produce, with the variation that comes from"

Read at Design Milk