We all need a space that makes us smile: meet architect Ab Rogers

Ab, too, strongly believes in the power of “space”. “I was fascinated by the idea of Maggie’s, how you can design spaces that influence the way you behave or feel. Colour, acoustics, the multi-sensual elements can really effect the way you think, breathe, look, see.

“Interior design is often seen as unrigorous and fluff,” he adds. “It’s the opposite. If you put a gorilla in a steel room he’ll be depressed and sit in a corner; in a light colourful space with movement he’ll be much happier.”

Then he gets carried away: “And laughter has cured more than anything else in the world.” He pauses: “That’s obviously totally made up and unproven, but you know what I mean.”

Almost on cue, the sun comes out and the room we’re in begins to radiate. It’s a cuboid of glass and steel, “a free-standing structure made out of a series of goal posts that essentially carry everything,” says Ab. It has great blocks of colour — all somehow subdued by the garden visible around us.

“It’s an inside outside house; a container of objects,” says Ab — indeed, it was a prototype for the idea behind Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre in Paris, and was recently listed. “It makes you happy, doesn’t it?” he says, glancing round. “Somehow it makes you want to smile.”

But there’s a snag: the house, which has known four generations of Rogers, has just been put up for sale because Ab and his wife Sophie Braimbridge, a chef and cookery writer, have separated. He met Sophie through his stepmother Ruth Rogers, the celebrated chef and co- founder of the River Café and they have two daughters, Ella, 14, and Lula, 12. Sophie has moved to Hampstead, but he says: “I’d rather not talk about it”.

Rex the dog comes in and receives all Ab’s attention for 10 minutes. He includes Rex in the conversation, feeding him little cubes of cheese. “Isn’t that right, Rex?” he says.

He uses a lot of design-speak — objects and buildings have a “narrative”, an “exhibition perspective”.

“It’s second nature. Everyone I grew up with — my mother, stepfather, my father — were all in architecture.”

His stepfather John Miller was professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art, his mother was Su Rogers (“there’s a shortage of e’s in my family”). “The main topic of conversation was design and architecture. All their friends were architects too.”

There were benefits — as a child his toys were unique designs. “I had two Action Man houses: one of chipboard with big circles cut in the sides for windows. The other of hardboard with a nice staircase.” He’s surprised to hear Action Man doesn’t usually have a house. “But he has to have a house! He’s got to go home. He needs to take off his camouflage and walk naked around the house.”

His father had a temper, he says, and “everything was argued and discussed endlessly. I thought that was normal”. Later he realised their family had “a slightly aggressive argumentative nature. Other families were shocked by me; I thought they were all quite straight.”

His parents divorced when he was two and both remarried. The family is sprawling, with multiple stepsiblings. His full brothers are Ben, a philosopher, and Zad, who runs a production company, and he has a half-brother, Ru. His other brother, Bo, died last year in a tragic accident aged 27.

“Essentially I was brought up with four parents,” he says. “And because I’ve recently separated I was talking to my stepsister Harriet Miller about it, and she was saying how brilliant it was to have this whole hybrid family. Had our parents not split, we wouldn’t have had that extraordinary experience. In some ways it’s more helpful — there are more people to get advice from, to talk to.”

His parents chose an anti-establishment education for him because Ab is “very” dyslexic. He went to King Alfred’s, a “progressive” school in north London. Later he achieved, after re-takes, “two of the most expensive O-levels”, in history and politics. “I failed pottery and photography. One report said: ‘Ab is an absolutely hopeless designer’. So I have two O-levels and a masters degree in industrial design.”

Ab is moving to a Victorian warehouse in Hackney. “It’s completely different — big with no internal structure.” He believes in “space over location, but I do like the independent nature in Hackney.” He adds quickly: “Although it can become a uniform — the beards, the plaid shirts. I love bicycles and I love coffee machines but do we need any more shops with bicycles and coffee machines?” He looks at Rex, who cocks his head.

Some of his 16-strong “design team” emerge from an adjacent studio to roll cigarettes and play table tennis. “They’re all delighted,” he chuckles, “although in Hackney they’ll have to try harder. Seriously, I’ve heard them talking about it.”