Set designer Poppy Bartlett and art director Ben Kelway swapped their small inner-city flat in Holborn for a larger new-build in Islington in 2015. They didn’t love the exterior at first – “it looked like a 1990s office building”, according to Ben – but the light and space gave it a lot of potential. It took six months for them to make it feel like home, converting it into a vibrant space filled with colour, art and vintage furniture from places like The Peanut Vendor. Here, they talk us through the transformation and how it now functions as a family home for them, children Frank and Lee, and George the dog.

Ben: “The first floor is double height and glass-fronted with a mezzanine, so we knew that we’d spend most of our time there because of the light. We moved the kitchen up from the ground floor and created an open-plan living area. There was no hidden area for laundry and general mess, so we built an enclosed utility room on the ground floor where the original kitchen was.

“After we had made the layout make sense for us, we wanted to enhance what the interior had going for it – space and light. We took out some of the mouldings as they didn’t seem in line with the modernity of the building. We also painted the internal window frames white, which were previously grey, and this helped to simplify things aesthetically.

“It’s an upside-down house: the bedrooms are on the lower-ground floor and so don’t have much light. We decided to treat this floor a bit like a separate little apartment, with coloured walls and carpet, as opposed to the white walls and wooden floor of the main spaces.”

Poppy: “We knew that we would come with a lot of stuff, which is busy on the eye, so we went with white walls and wood floors in the main spaces to serve as a blank canvas. Ben has always loved parquet and we thought that it would work throughout the common areas. We also thought we better make the kitchen island an appealing thing to look at, as it functions as a big divider between the living area and the kitchen, so we chose to clad it in a jazzy terrazzo.”

Ben: “The upstairs kitchen means that we live on the first floor really, with cooking and eating all happening up there, whereas the ground floor feels like a luxury space – a nice calm open hall, with Poppy’s office at the back.

“We split the back bedroom on the lower-ground floor into two as we’ve just had our second child and made the en suite into the kids’ bathroom, which we painted a yellow gloss with a white-and-black checkerboard floor, which is very jolly. We tiled half of the back lightwell with Moroccan blue tiles and painted the wall above a hot pink, which feels kind of Miami-ish and spills a warm light into the ground-floor office.

“A good interior should function well and feel authentic and organic, rather than being driven by one style or notion of good taste. It should feel like something that has developed over time, with objects that reflect the interests and experiences of whoever lives there.

“For the most part the look is modern and clean, but not minimal, simply because we have a lot of books, pictures and records, so there is quite a lot of colour and things to look at. This place is about triple the size of our old flat, so we added a big brass-topped dining table and chairs and a couple of sofas and armchairs.

“We’ve bought a lot from our friends at the Peanut Vendor and Open by Appointment. There’s various pictures from photographers that we both work with. Poppy’s sister, Laura Bartlett, is an art dealer so we’ve bought a lot from her over the years. Some of those artists are also friends – Lydia Gifford and Fergus Hare, for example.

“Upstairs on the mezzanine is a lovely place to sit alone with lots of plants and light and is a kind of replacement garden.

“We recently saw the Eames house when we were in LA, which is obviously the gold standard of modernist interiors! What was really interesting was that they had displayed with such care all sorts of seemingly random objects that they’d amassed on their travels or found in nature and it gave the whole place an extra layer of character. That makes for a really special interior, I think.”

Poppy and Ben, what do you think it means to live in a modern way?

Ben: “It’s about being able to use the space flexibly; to not be too confined by the idea of certain areas being for specific functions. There’s a freedom in a modern space to furnish it with a mix of different styles – vintage and new, minimal and decorative – and for it all somehow to work under one roof.”

Is there a house on The Modern House website that’s caught your eye?

Poppy: “The Gingerbread House in Hackney designed by our friend Laura Dewe Mathews. The outside is clad in unusual round cedar shingles and for the interior walls she’s used a spruce, which makes for a very calm, tranquil space. The house is a super-modern design but the materials and use of natural light give it an organic sensibility, which we love.”