A dream designer

The London-based architect Tom Croft isn’t the type to shout about anything. But if he was, his client book would be the talk of the town.

It’s a roll call of top art dealers, highly-regarded collectors and celebrities at the Paul McCartney end of the scale. But Croft is discreet in both his day-to-day dealings and his design, often working in historic buildings and making them fit for modern day-purposes. “It’s important to be deferential to the original character of the place,” he says.

His most recently completed project is a home in Albany (the fourth he’s done here), that unique collection of apartments in a 1770s building that stretches from Piccadilly to Vigo Street, for the art dealer Per Skarstedt. “It’s on the top two floors in the original William Chambers-designed mansion,” says Croft. “It’s a Grade I-listed building, so there are things you can’t do. But contemporary art works well in Georgian spaces — they are good at being simple and the windows are big.”

Transforming spaces

The apartment was 1970s, filled with stripped pine. “We’ve taken it back to the 1770s by repainting the rooms in a more historic way, but we’ve also brought it right up to date by making the bathrooms and the kitchen modern and minimal. The bathrooms are all white marble — actually a Georgian material. The kitchen is a U-shaped chocolate brown boîte by Bulthaup.”

He had previously created a gallery space for Skarstedt in Old Bond Street. “He deals primarily in established artists of the late 20th century, so a lot of the work needs a good setting,” says Croft. “His aesthetic isn’t a white box one. His original New York gallery is in the Upper East Side in an elegant 19th-century Palazzo building. There’s almost a domesticity about these spaces.”

For David Gill, the specialist in contemporary limited-edition furniture, he installed enormous windows into a corner façade in St James, transforming what had been a particularly unwelcoming and gloomy gallery space into one where people happily walk in off the street.
Croft describes the gallery world as a “virtuous circle” where work comes as the result of recommendations and homes are inevitably designed with art in mind. One client, with an impressive collection of contemporary work, looked at 50 properties before finding one in the Hyde Park Estate that suited her purposes.

“She wanted scale and big walls,” says Croft. “And a ground floor that would be right for hosting big events. People stand on the stairs to give speeches. I’ve seen Kevin Spacey on those stairs.” Croft began by making photorealistic renders of every room and every work of art, to show the client how they would come together.

That special touch

“Some clients are good at imagining spaces, but for a complicated project they need more help,” he says. But his favourite part of the house is the 30-metre long corridor he reinstated in the basement. “The ceiling is Barisol, a material usually used for swimming pool ceilings. It comes in gigantic lengths and has an otherworldly shininess,” says Croft. “Shiny ceilings are my tip for 2015.”

Deference, however, isn’t always the order of the day. One house, completed 10 years ago in Notting Hill, still has its 1846 exterior — “It’s a glorious house in a kind of Greco-Roman version of Georgian, a style that didn’t catch on,” says Croft — but has a completely new interior and the addition of an impressive 11-bay steel colonnade that incorporates a new dining room, library and drawing room.

The colonnade doesn’t just create more space, but is a significant architectural move to unite the rather asymmetric existing parts of the house.Success can be measured in many ways, but when it comes to clients, a following commission is probably the surest sign, and Croft has just completed a new-build house in Scotland for the same people. “It’s an abstracted version of Scottish vernacular, with slate roofs and white rendered walls,” says Croft. Sadly we can’t show any images here, but suffice to say, it’s a little bit more palatial than your average crofters cottage.