A Room of One’s Own: Lucy Sear-Barlow and Joshua Sear’s galley kitchen is a lesson in functionality, flair and, above all, fun

Lucy Sear-Barlow’s kitchen is a masterclass in making the most of what you’ve got. A small galley it may be, but that hasn’t stopped her and her husband, Joshua Sear, from designing it in a way that bursts at the seams with personality and panache.

This, admittedly, is not a surprise, given that Lucy and Joshua make up the Notting Hill-based interiors studio Barlow & Barlow, which Lucy founded with her brother Max, a lighting designer, in 2013. Joshua, whose background is in architectural and garden design and construction, joined the business five years later. Their practice “celebrates collections and things,” Lucy says. “We are definitely not minimalist. We like a house to tell the story of the person that lives there.”

The pair bought their flat in west London in 2011. Despite doing a complete renovation, they couldn’t make the kitchen fit in any other space without compromising on bedrooms. Creating one that would work in the small footprint was a must. “When we first redid it, we went for an ‘industrial chic’ look,” Lucy says. “Stainless-steel cupboards, exposed-brick walls and a poured-concrete worktop, which was all the rage… In 2011.” A problem the couple soon found, however, was that the concrete surface didn’t age well at all. “We sort of got scammed. The guy who did it really didn’t know what he was doing and left it almost half-finished. It kept getting cracked and chipped and started to feel quite grubby. When we had children, it simply wasn’t practical.”

Doing away with the industrial look, they swapped the exposed brick for plaster walls, added a rose tiled splashback and replaced the countertop with a marble one. “We used a lovely pink-and-green stone. Marble will always mark and you have to live with that, but because this is so veined, it wears those marks remarkably well. We added a gold kickplate below and put brass handles on the original stainless-steel doors, because I love the mixture of gold and silver – both in interior design and in jewellery. Just those changes gave the kitchen a whole new lease of life. It went from being clinical and masculine to quite feminine. It represented us saying goodbye to our old life and hello to our new one as a family.”

“The concrete countertop was a real lesson,” Lucy says. “It was a good reminder not to follow trends and to consider longevity when making design choices. The marble and stainless steel we have now are both timeless materials; look at any working kitchen or fancy bar and you’re sure to find one or the other. The steel doors, however, are terrible for showing up every single smear and fingerprint – but those are the signs of life. Ultimately, we wanted to design a space that was practical as well as beautiful, but we had to recognise the parameters of the room. A Shaker-style kitchen was never going to look right in that tiny area; it would have looked ridiculous. We needed to come up with a solution that would maximise what space we had and would age beautifully as our children grew up.”

Lucy’s affinity for collecting, particularly images of fish, played an important role in the decoration. Hanging above the banquette is a huge painting of a mackerel, built into the wall in such a way that it looks like a mural, reminiscent of the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance in its chalky texture. “I know it looks like it, but – believe it or not – it wasn’t painted in this space,” Lucy says. “I found it in a big antique studio in north Wales. I’ve always been obsessed with fish plates, so I had to have it.”

The painting itself had a plaster background, which informed the decision to leave the gypsum walls in their raw state. “We battened round the fish and colour-matched the walls,” Lucy continues. “The hues of the mackerel, which are just so beautiful, influenced our choice of marble as well. We wanted everything to tie in tonally.”

Her keen collector’s eye is evident in other areas of the kitchen too, not least in the food-themed gallery wall and collection of ceramic fruit that preside over the worktop. The large red-wine bottle came from the Rose Bowl flea market in LA, found by the couple on a buying trip with a client and carried home in a suitcase. The fish painting (another one) in the middle of the wall was unearthed at a Paris flea; the rest came from galleries or auctions.

A row of Delftware houses – once used to serve gin to business-class customers on KLM flights – line a shelf. “You can find them at markets. I love them. When we first did the kitchen, I decided I wanted to line a whole shelf with just those buildings, all the way along. I’ve still a bit of a way to go – but I’m working on it!” Until her ceramic street is complete, the rest of the space is dedicated to a colourful collection of other pottery pieces, ranging from hanging bundles of fruit to candlesticks with faces. Barlow & Barlow’s logo is a pineapple, so there are a fair few of them too. “Kitschy as hell,” Lucy says, “but we love it.”

The most striking object in her miscellany is, without a doubt, the garlic-bulb lamp that stands at the end of the kitchen. “I bought it on eBay one night when I was awake with a newborn baby. I made Joshua drive to Chiswick in the morning to pick it up. He thought I’d gone mad, but he loves it now. Somehow, it fits perfectly.”

Further reading

Barlow & Barlow

Lucy on Instagram

Joshua on Instagram