Two years ago, keen to get in at the start of the £1.5 billion regeneration of Elephant and Castle in South London, ceramicist Peter Ting and his partner, artist and curator Brian Kennedy, bought a flat off plan. By buying when the block of flats was still in the development stage, they were able to “adjust” the space before the walls went up. They started by moving the proposed hall wall to make a more generous entrance and incorporating what would have been the third bedroom into the living room.

The move to the customised, two-bedroom apartment meant downsizing from their terraced house in Herne Hill. This involved donating furniture and belongings to local jumble sales and charity shops. It also meant saying farewell to the garden.

“We travel a lot for our work and seemed to be endlessly trying to catch up with maintenance on the house and garden, but now we feel that our home works for us, rather than us working for it,” says Kennedy. The central location also makes travelling easier. It takes Ting 20 minutes to get to Asprey in New Bond Street, where he is head of homewares, and about the same time to the Royal College of Art, where he is a visiting lecturer. Kennedy can be at any of the London airports within an hour when he needs to travel to Ireland or South Africa on business.

Only a few pieces of furniture survived the radical downsizing. “In the end, we moved 99 boxes of books and ceramics and five pieces of furniture,” says Ting.

In their new home, they started by putting in areas of colour and pattern. The end wall in the open-plan living/dining/kitchen space is an unusual shade of dark raspberry. “We were trying to find a perfect shade of red and, in the process, bought dozens of trial pots of paint. In the end, we mixed them all together and came up with this shade. It was intended to be a base coat, but we liked it so much, it stayed,” says Kennedy.

For the area that was originally designated as a third bedroom, the pair chose a vivid green, hand-printed floral wallpaper by Chiswick-based artist Marthe Armitage. They ordered it through Hamilton Weston Wallpapers & Design, and its leafy greenness serves as a reminder of the garden Kennedy and Ting left behind in Herne Hill.

The main wall of the guest bedroom is covered with a number of different, but compatible, boldly striped wallpapers by Sandberg. “We bought a roll of each and put them up side by side, using the darkest one to make a nominal headboard above the divan,” says Kennedy.

The main bedroom’s walls are papered in faintly striped wallpaper from Zimmer + Rohde, while the bed is draped with a length of 18th-century Italian mattress ticking. In the now spacious hall, the walls are painted in Sugared Violet from Farrow & Ball, which acts as a background to various shelves, supports and bookcases.

In the entrance, pictures are arranged on shelves so that they can be seen in rotation or swapped with others in the flat or in storage in the deep hall cupboard. Individual, bevel-edged shelves support ceramics, some traditional Blanc de Chine figurines and more contemporary pieces by South African potter Nico Masemolo.

A new style of home and the buzz of contemporary urban living have also had an effect on Ting’s work. While developing some new ceramics for an exhibition, he approached the venerable china company Royal Crown Derby and, during his research in its archives, became fascinated by the traditional Imari pattern – a cobalt blue, iron-ore red and gold oriental design that has graced Crown Derby products for almost 200 years.

Ting went on to design a new range of tableware for the company using elements of the Imari pattern in round shapes on a white background. The result is the Hachi collection, a mixture of bowls, plates and platters that looks splendid on the table or breakfast bar of any home – including one that is barely two years old.

royalcrownderby.co.uk

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