Handmade home: a design duo's London residence

Cox comes from a family of makers, restorers and antique dealers. His mother is a painter, his brother a furniture designer, his father deals in medieval carvings, his grandfather traded in European fine art and his grandmother dealt in antique jewellery. “It would have been disappointing if I’d ended up with a proper job,” he says. “And unacceptable if I hadn’t gone into something creative.”

Christopher is one half of Cox London, a studio and foundry specialising in bespoke handcrafted furniture, lighting and objects. The brand’s intricate pieces, often following forms from the natural world, can be found in private homes from Manhattan to Mumbai.

The other half of Cox London is Nicola Cox, a New Zealander. She moved to London in the 1990s, and the pair met while studying sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art. “We were lucky – it was one of the few colleges where material and process were part of the curriculum. We had access to a foundry, piles of marble, wood, metal, a plaster room… all these wonderful spaces,” says Christopher.

“I discovered the transformation of material from plaster to wax, and then pouring bronze metal,” adds Nicola. “There is an allure to molten metal, it’s something you never get sick of.” Much of their work reflects an appreciation of patinas, materials, textures.

A few years after graduating they set up their own design studio, initially working from a garage while they lived in a series of house-shares. Now they have an Edwardian house in north London, shared with their teenage daughter, Olivia, and dogs Buddy and Jagger, which is a natural testing ground for their work.

“We like to feel the connection between the earth and the materials we are working with,” says Nicola. “We’ll bring a chandelier right down to a central table to draw your eye up,” she adds, pointing to the sinuous chandelier in the dining room, inspired by a magnolia tree. “To create movement, pairing the organic with functionality.”

Another source of inspiration is nature, with motifs from the biodiverse habitats of the UK and New Zealand emerging in their designs. When Christopher was designing the cast-iron legs for the dining table, he channelled the feathery uprights of reed beds, a natural British wetland habitat. The chairs are rooted in the Bauhaus vernacular, “something simple in ironwork, an honest material. They’re a sort of maker’s chair,” he says.

The table operates as a sculpture bench, a work table and a spot to share supper. They unfurl large pieces of paper across the table to draw designs. “We like multifunctional spaces and, we should be honest, it gets used more for drawing than dining,” Christopher says with a laugh.

They also like a clean, contemporary aesthetic, which they have brought in alongside the architectural details of the period property. Forged iron picture rails hang from the walls and in the entrance, in a modernist take on an Edwardian coat and hat rack. The walls are hand-trowelled with concrete plaster. “We think of colour as a backdrop to the things that we love,” says Nicola. “The organic patina of the plaster finish allows light to bounce off it. You go from traditional lime on the ground floor into something deeper and more cosy as you go upstairs. It is very velvety, it feels almost like fabric.”

They reclaimed the loft, turning it into the contemporary main bedroom, and raised the ceiling to accommodate their Polypore chandelier, a light inspired by the intricate folds of bracket fungi. It’s made from forged iron and 3,000 hand-pulled glass leaves. A quartet of antique leather chinoiserie panels hangs behind the bed, balancing their love of antiquity and the avant-garde. They rescued the reclaimed Edwardian wooden boards from a factory in Manchester.

Their trademark metallic work is etched throughout the house like a florid signature. “It is a language we were using upstairs,” Christopher says of the iron banister unfurling from the top to the bottom of the staircase. “The scroll turns nicely and takes us from an Edwardian vibe below to more modernist in the loft.”

As a self-confessed houseplant lover, for more than two decades Christopher has tended some species that thrive in their conservatory, a room original to the building. “It’s very common for people to knock the rear off a period house and put a big glass box on the back of it – we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to stay with the original architectural design of the house and work around it.” They added reclaimed Danish terracotta tiles, which unfold into the kitchen, and wooden French doors that connect to the garden.

In the sitting room, a salvaged smooth marble fire surround from Retrouvius sits alongside their custom-designed bibliothèque, a blend of glass, iron, brass and oak. The shelving system was conceived after a visit to La Maison de Verre in Paris, built between 1928 and 1932 and one of the first buildings in France to be constructed from glass and steel. “We love this combination, where function meets art,” says Nicola. “It is multifunctional, the cupboards are the perfect size for a bottle of brandy and the leather desk folds out neatly.”

coxlondon.com