A bibliophile's understatedly luxurious apartment

The fact that the owner of this flat knows the telephone number of his removal man off by heart will come as no surprise to his friends. 'Well, every seven or so years I get an itch to do something different and so I move on.' That he does so is fortuitous to those who follow on behind him, for they will enjoy an interior that not only has been perfectly executed but also bears witness to his fastidious eye and a meticulous attention to detail.

This apartment in an 1860s terrace, with uninterrupted views over Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens across its own communal gardens, had been untouched since the Sixties when it was first converted. The top floors of four houses had been demolished and replaced by a pent house that stretches across the buildings; it had been decorated and lived in by one owner who had bought it 40 years previously.

Although it was very dated, with none of the original Victorian details remaining, the current owner sensibly lived in the property for some time, only slightly changing bathrooms -re-enamelling baths white that had originally been pink, for example, but made no structural changes.

Then he managed to buy the roof space above, extending the volume of the flat, and with ceilings a potential four-and-a-half metres high, he decided on a very different layout in which to live. The flat he bought had a small hall, a good-size sitting room overlooking the park, a rather mean dining room where the kitchen table now stands and a kitchen looking north. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a dressing room completed the layout, with all rooms opening on to a terrace.

'I was fed up moving from room to room and wanted a more relaxed way of living,' he says, starting by knocking the dining room, kitchen and drawing room into one big room, as he imagined it to be ‘a barn in the sky'. As he says, the difficulty in open-plan living areas is to design a kitchen that allows the cooking and washing up to be done away from the rest of the space. He did this by creating an L-shape kitchen, with the ovens and sinks hidden behind a wall of fridges, wine coolers and storage, opening on to a large island facing the dining area.

The hall became part of an expansive sitting room and library area, and the three smallish bedrooms and bathrooms were converted into two much larger rooms with ensuite bathrooms. He also created a small but practical study that's high enough to allow for the storage of many box files.

A series of large skylights were introduced in the main room and corridor. In taking out the ceiling, he decided that the height of the doors and the entrance to the corridor should be raised, converting what had once been a dark, rather pinched entrance to the bedrooms into a wonderfully light and airy space filled with books. Somewhat quixotically, he asked his specialist painter Mathew Bray to copy the colour of a friend's faded T-shirt when painting the corridor, similarly using a pair of saffron trousers as the inspiration for the walls of the living area.

The floor, which you notice as soon as you enter, was 'extraordinarily expensive and probably a foolish move', he admits with a laugh before explaining, 'Mathew found these old pine boards in a warehouse in Manchester. Their surface was finished in ridges that caught the light at different stages of the day. These were put through several stages of staining and then each individual board was curved at the edges, the style being that of an old English country house. It was a bit bonkers in a modern flat. But it gives me joy as soon as I enter.'