House in Notting Hill Photoshoot

HOUSE IN NOTTING HILL | PHOTO-SHOOT

By Alex York, Co-Founder of Recent Spaces

Back at the tail end of 2013, when I was still operating as Atelier York, I was commissioned to produce a set of interior still images and a short animated film of a beautiful, unique house refurbishment in Notting Hill, together with one of our very talented artists Jan Galliott. The idea was to help the client understand what architect Brian Ma Siy, together with ABA International and the rest of the design team, had designed and envisioned for what was to be their client's family home, filled with the client's own extensive, unique and precious artwork collection, much of which we photographed, scanned and converted into 3D assets for use in our CGIs (see the African masks in the reception room for a good example). Some time after the project was completed at the end of 2013/early 2014, it was decided that the house would instead be renovated to a very similar, although not identical but very high specification, and marketed.

One year later, in the spring of 2015, work had more or less completed on the refurbishment and we were commissioned to carry out a full interior and exterior photo-shoot of the house for the agent, for their marketing brochure, for which I enlisted the help of a super-talented photographer and long-time friend of ours, David Connolly. Both of us had extensive experience shooting architecture and interiors, but neither of us had shot anything quite on this scale, with quite such exquisite detail. Architect Brian Ma Siy is also a wonderful and experienced photographer, so between the three of us, and with a significant amount of kit including multiple shift lenses, a range of primes and zooms and the extraordinary Canon 11-24mm f/4l for the really tight spaces, we managed to cover the whole house in just two very intense, tiring but rewarding shoots, followed by many late nights of editing and post-production over several weeks.

A year and a half later, we've finally been given permission to publish these, and a select few highlights from the set can be viewed below, in two sections - Firstly a CGI V Photo comparison set that reveals how close we got with our visualisations and how similar the final, built design is to the original concept (and how interesting the differences in design details are), and secondly a small selection of some of our favourite photos from the set.

This was a very special and memorable project for us and we're extremely proud to finally be able to show it to the world.

Enjoy!

Alex York
Co-founding partner at Recent Spaces

A word from architect Brian Ma Siy:

"Working with Alex York and his team at Recent Spaces is a joy. Alex has an architect’s eye for spatial depth and a designer’s instinct for strong composition. He is also fastidiously detailed in his approach and execution. In the middle of the design process, Alex created computer generated images to test interior compositions and to help the client understand the spaces he was going to be living in. At completion of the building works, Alex and his team made a beautiful set of as-built photographs of the house. We worked very closely together on the two commissions to ensure that both the CGI images and photographs precisely reflected the architecture and the wealth of details. Due to this highly proactive collaboration, the results capture the modern design interventions as well as the period character of the house. It also meant that we had a “before” set of images and “after” set of photographs. These naturally link together and emphasise the consistency of the architectural vision from start to finish."

PART 1 - CGI V PHOTO