Rigby & Rigby’s Project WC2B 130 has featured in Abode 2’s June Issue. The award-winning project is profiled in their article “Beau Selector: Rigby & Rigby are specialists in ultra-prime residential architecture and design.”

The article comments on the impact of the modern world on the way we live which is particularly poignant during the Covid-19 pandemic. “While sustainability and the environment dominate the majority of our changes in lifestyle habits, we need our interiors to make us feel calm and reassured in times of uncertainty.

In the past, calm interiors would have been associated with a neutral colour palette, but a new monochrome scheme that is warmer, tactile and full of nuance is emerging.”

“Rigby & Rigby completed the interior design and architecture of a penthouse in London’s Covent Garden developed by Latis Group, who provided the base build including the staircase, kitchen and bar. The interiors comprise of a variety of colours which mark a return to this new monochrome palette, from light, smoky and dark greys and matte black. These colours inspire a feeling of solidarity and grounded-ness whilst projecting a contemporary elegance. Perhaps an antidote to the surrounding anxiety of our times?

Rigby & Rigby have been quietly creating high-end residential projects for some of the most demanding private clients and developers in London, and this project is testament to their ability to create interiors that are at once sophisticated, while improving wellbeing through use of colour and design. What makes this choice of ‘monochrome’ different to past trends is that it is about texture and the use of noble materials as much as the tonal variation. It is a monochrome that evokes a warm and comforting calm, instead of the more severe monochrome palettes evident in previous modernist iterations.

The penthouse sitting room has grey walls, with a kitchen featuring Marron Cohiba dark grey granite slab top with a bevel cut edge detail, set against oak-veneered panels to bring tone and texture to the sleek design. The staircase area is flooded with natural light from the skylight above in a double height space, with a matte, smoky grey banister structure enclosing a steel staircase which has been finished with engineered oak floorboards. The abstract black and white artworks, matte black kitchenware accessories, marble-topped off-white table on the outdoor terrace surrounded by further off-white furniture add further to the monochrome theme, broken up only by the use of green and blue furniture in the indoor sitting room and entertainment areas.

Rigby & Rigby have found a way to create warm, contemporary and calming interiors by returning to a new monochrome palette, the perfect antidote to the stresses of modern life as we enter a new decade.”