Lost in space

Put yourself in Eamonn Wilmott's shoes. You've bought the apartment with the 48ft-long living room and 35ft-high ceilings in the requisite urban industrial building (in this case, the former Thames Water HQ in Islington). Come to convert and furnish it, you find that not only is the building listed but your furniture takes on doll's-house proportions.

'We had all kinds of fun with the planning authorities,' recalls the fortysomething dotcommer. 'A listed building means that you cannot remove or make changes to the historic character of the building.' In the case of Wilmott's apartment - once the boardroom - this meant not just the cornicing, but built-in plaques, clocks, wooden benches and bookcases too.

It was a game of give and take with the authorities. After much prevarication, the bookshelves became a positive feature; the plaques and clocks protected behind glazed balustrades; the benches cushioned into home-office areas on the balcony. The real sticking point, though, was the cornicing, which Wilmott eventually agreed to retain after removing the false ceiling which housed a family of pigeons. In turn, the planners agreed to allow him to encase the plasterwork on the walls with giant storage cupboards at each end of the living room.

For Wilmott, it was a case of love at first sight. 'I saw it on a Thursday and bought it on the Monday. I just loved the impact of such a huge space' he muses. However, that turned out to be the biggest drawback. 'All my furniture looked tiny. I had what I thought was this huge sideboard which ended up looking like a coffee table.'

It was time to enlist the help of a friend, the property developer Sean Rafter, who in turn introduced him to CA1, the contemporary bespoke furniture design company. Together they worked on an organic process to create outsize furniture that would fit the space.

'A large space is potentially very anti-social,' says Wilmott. 'Holding a conversation is not only hard thanks to the acoustics, but also intimidating if you are perched on a sofa in an empty space.' The solution was to divide the room into zones using a six-metre-long underlit onyx table, by B&V Masonry.

For the TV area, CA1 designed a sociable semi-circular, eight-metre-long sofa. 'It was hard to visualise how it would look,' says Wilmott. But CA1 found a solution, and made a life-size model in cardboard first. After looking at the basic treatments - off-white walls and European walnut floor - Wilmott settled for warm, harmonising colours for the furnishings.

There's a clubby feel to one end of the living room thanks to two four-metre crown-cut wenge and maroon leather sofas. Shaggy goatskins from Stepan Tertsakian soften the floor, while alcantara fabric on the semi-circular sofa and a four-metre maccassar sideboard lift the TV end of the room. Elsewhere the apartment is equally subtle in tone. The kitchen is a standard white affair with a central island which lines up with the stairs.

Beyond, the blue of an aquarium lightens the dark hall while in Wilmott's upstairs bedroom the muted hues continue. The bathroom is functional with Vola fittings and - the now almost de rigueur - mosaic tiles. Clearly, the focus of Wilmott's attention is the outsize living room downstairs which is perfect for partying. 'I've had 130 people to dinner, and at New Year I had a strays' party,' he reels off.

If this all sounds too good to be true, the experience hasn't left Wilmott totally unscathed. 'Taking up the floor for cabling and sanding it was one of the most damaging experiences of my life. Everywhere you went there was this horrible dust.' But that's a low price to pay for such a high-spec apartment. Not bad for a man who describes himself as 'fluffy rug meets modernist'.