Pimlico Apartment Grade II Listed Victorian Apartment, London
The client was in Bulgaria. The designer was in Australia. The flat was in Pimlico. What the project needed was someone on the ground in London: a trusted design professional who could supervise the works, make informed decisions when they arose, and report back to the client weekly throughout. The brief was not to design the interior — the design had been decided — but to carry it through construction faithfully, and to keep the client close to a project they could not be present for.
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The challenge
The entire interior design existed only as sketches. Before construction could begin, those sketches had to be translated into proper working drawings: fully dimensioned, coordinated, and buildable. That process of producing the technical drawings revealed what the sketches had not: proportions that needed revisiting, sequences that did not resolve, details that were not yet buildable as drawn. The design was sound in intention but had not yet been tested against reality.
Each problem had to be resolved without pausing the site. Construction projects do not wait for slow decisions, and with the client at a time-zone distance and the designer in another hemisphere, the person on the ground had to be capable of making those calls directly. That is what the supervision role became: not just watching the work happen, but actively resolving design questions as they emerged on site.
Then, during the strip-out of the master bathroom, the floor was found to be heavily structurally compromised. On a listed building, a discovery of this kind has a fixed sequence of obligations: the listed building authority had to be informed, building control had to be notified, and the leaseholder required formal communication. A structural engineer had to be appointed and brought up to speed. All of this had to happen immediately, and none of it could be allowed to stop the programme. It did not. The issue was coordinated and resolved without any delay to the works.
The approach
Lisa's training is in architecture, not only interior design, and that distinction matters on a project of this kind. Reading a sketch and knowing where it will not build is a technical skill. Producing the working drawings from which a contractor can actually work is a separate technical skill. Making on-site decisions that keep the design intent intact while the site keeps moving is a third. All three were required here, and all three were handled by the same person.
At the same time as the structural issue was being worked through, the full delivery chain was in motion: permits, the main contractor, specialist suppliers, a joiner, and the marble company all required active coordination. None of them were paused while the structural question was resolved. That is what project management at this level actually means — not sequential problem-solving, but holding the whole network in parallel, keeping each part of it moving while something unexpected is handled in another part of it.
Client communication ran throughout: weekly updates kept the client informed and in control of their project from abroad, with clarity about what had been decided and why. The flat is nearly complete, and the client is satisfied with the result. The project delivered what the original brief asked for, a finished interior that matched the designer's intention, despite the practical difficulties of a geographically dispersed team working from an incomplete set of drawings.
What this project demonstrates
A listed building refurbishment does not go wrong because of the protected elements. It goes wrong in the gaps between consultants — when a structural problem surfaces and nobody is holding the project. This project is an example of what it looks like when someone is.
Listed building consent. Structural problem-solving. Full coordination from planning through to completion. One studio, one point of contact, one programme.
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