The owner of fabric house Claremont turns a Sixties house in London in to a slice of America's west coast

Adam Sykes grew up in an eighteenth-century weaver's cottage in Yorkshire. Unlike the original inhabitants of the house, his family did not weave by the light provided by its rows and rows of windows, but good quality cloth had long played a role in their lives and continues to do so in Adam's. His grandfather was a Jewish émigré from Vienna who found great success as a textiles manufacturer in Huddersfield, making knitted jersey used by Parisian couture houses Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Balmain and Patou. Adam's father was the director of a mill that provided cloth for the tailoring industry. Since 1997, Adam has owned Claremont, one of Britain's most prestigious fabric houses, which works with small manufacturers to produce its own designs, as well as those from the Warner archive.

When Adam was 12, his mother took him to meet a teacher about getting some extra maths tuition. It was a life-changing experience, but not because he mastered the mysteries of fractional equations. 'She lived in this amazing Fifties house,' Adam recalls. 'I couldn't believe it; it was like seeing something from another planet. Suddenly, I saw there is a different way of living.'

He saw far more evidence of this a dozen or so years later when, with a ceramics degree in hand, he lived in Los Angeles for a year. He worked in a fabric showroom, immersed himself in the world of interior design, and revelled in the Mid-century Modern architecture on America's west coast. It wasn't until 2014 that Adam finally secured a bit of that for himself, in a leafy south London suburb not known primarily for its Modernist architecture.

Until then, Adam had been living in a fabulous Thirties penthouse in South Kensington (featured in House & Garden in March 2002). He decided it was time for a change and although he could not picture himself living in the countryside, he did want a detached house with a garden. 'I remember clearly: it was June 4 and I should have been working, but instead I was looking at houses online. That day, at 3pm, I came to see this house and before I even got up the drive, I thought, yes that's it. Whatever it takes, I want that house.'

Designed in 1963 by architects Peter Foggo and David Thomas, the single-storey dwelling adheres to Mies van der Rohe's idea of 'skin and bones' architecture, where a largely glass shell hangs around a steel or concrete framework. It has been said that the private houses that Foggo and Thomas designed were among just a handful in Britain that were in the same league as the experimental Case Study Houses built by the likes of Eames, Neutra and Ellwood in California from the Forties to the Sixties. This comparison is significant, and not lost on Adam.

'It might sound ridiculous, but my whole thing was to create a house that might have been in California,' he says. 'The mid-century houses in Palm Springs and Los Angeles were gentler than those built in Europe, where it was often just white walls, downlights and wood floors.' Adam preferred the American version of the movement: 'There were carpets everywhere, and curtains. I very much wanted that more relaxed look.'

The work that ensued was extensive. A 'dark, ugly and badly built' extension housing a single garage and the main bedroom and dressing room were immediately torn down, leaving the original rectangular house. This itself was completely gutted, while a new extension, with a large kitchen and entertaining area, spare bedroom and utility room, was added, creating an L-shape footprint. While its shape and proportions and the use of glass are all in keeping with the rest of the house, the extension has not been built to blend seamlessly with the original. Instead, it is clad in Siberian larch, marking it out clearly as a new addition.