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The fashion designer Antoni Burakowski and the hairdresser Kerry Warn met in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2005 that they bought their first house. Before that, Burakowski lived in the same council flat he had lived in since 1984, when he was a student at Saint Martins School of Art (where he met Alison Roberts, with whom he formed the fashion label Antoni & Alison 25 years ago). Warn, who spends much of his time abroad working on film sets, most recently as the hair designer for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, lived in a flat in Fulham before moving in with Burakowski.
And what a house they bought. Standing in a corner of a grand Georgian square in King’s Cross, London, the four storeys back on to the railway line over what used to be the River Fleet, giving you vertigo if you look out of the top-floor window down to the tracks beneath. The location is like something from The Ladykillers. ‘We were interested in a project,’ Burakowski recalls. ‘When we saw the house in the estate agent’s window it was just a shell.’ It had been used as a hostel for the staff of a local hotel, and each of the eight bedrooms had its own sink, so the whole lot had to be ripped out and started from scratch. Over the course of a couple of years, Burakowski and Warn – with a little help from a team of dedicated builders and craftsmen – transformed it into a grand two-bedroom home with vast, high-ceilinged rooms and a wonderfully neat walled urban garden at the back, with the Thameslink line from Brighton into King’s Cross St Pancras running below it.
Both Burakowski and Warn are keen collectors (tea sets, vases, lampshades, pressed glass, photographs, toys – anything, really, that catches their eyes) and had no problem filling the space. ‘We’ve always loved going to junk shops and flea markets,’ Burakowski says. ‘It’s like going to a museum, but you can buy the things.’ Among the art deco furniture is a fine piece by the British designer Betty Joel – a wardrobe bought when he was a student. It cost £500 – an entire term’s grant. Back then it crowded Burakowski’s small flat, but now it has space to breathe on the top floor of the house, where four rooms have been knocked into one to form a library and dressing-room.
Down the stairs at the front of the house is their spacious bedroom, and they each have their own bathroom next door, separated by a window salvaged from the Waldorf Hotel and a pair of glass-panelled doors they just happened to have in a lock-up. ‘Why we had those doors, I don’t know,’ says Burakowski, laughing. They look as though they have always been there.
Below this is the ground floor with its double reception rooms, packed with more collected ephemera. On a half-landing is the Robot Room: Burakowski and Roberts found the Blackpool illumination with gaudy coloured lights in a fairground-machine graveyard in Blackpool in the 1990s and drove it back in a van. Roberts rewired it, and for years they had it in their shop, which meant there was barely any room for clothes.
In the basement, the kitchen cabinets were built from floorboards salvaged from a squat in south London. A huge dresser is filled with Burakowski’s collection of green Wood & Sons Beryl china; another cupboard is crammed with colourful 1930s American Fiesta dinnerware and rare pieces by the American designer Russel Wright. At the back of the kitchen is an old coal hole that has been transformed into a lavatory with immaculate tiling (using the same rectangular London Underground tiles that are in the kitchen).
Although the house is vast, there is still not quite enough space for Burakowski and Warn, who still have more collections in storage, all carefully catalogued. When asked if they plan to get rid of the lock-up eventually, Burakowski looks horrified. ‘No,’ he says. ‘We will probably get another one.’
For more pictures of inside the house, see Inside a Georgian London townhouse
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