There is a moment, somewhere between the completion of a project and the client's first visit, that our entire team exists in a state of suspended anticipation. Every decision made over months of work — every material chosen, every proportion debated, every finish approved and sometimes rejected and reconsidered — suddenly feels both perfectly inevitable and terrifyingly fragile.
The Nakuru Penthouse was the most ambitious project we had undertaken at that point. Eighteen months. 4,200 square feet. A client with an extraordinary personal collection of East African art and an equally extraordinary willingness to trust us completely. And a view — overlooking the Rift Valley — that we knew would either be the most powerful element in the design, or the one that made everything else feel inadequate.
"The best spaces don't compete with their surroundings. They complete them."
— Michael James, on the design philosophy behind the Nakuru PenthouseUnderstanding the Brief
When our client — a collector who asked to remain anonymous — first contacted us, the brief arrived in an unusual form: not a document, but a dinner. Three hours at their home in Karen, surrounded by the art they had collected over twenty years, talking about how spaces had made them feel throughout their life.
What emerged from that conversation was not a list of requirements but a series of emotional truths. They wanted to feel, upon waking, as though they were still inside the landscape. They wanted their art to feel not displayed but discovered — as though each piece had always belonged exactly where it was placed. They wanted the space to feel simultaneously ancient and completely alive.
These are not instructions. They are aspirations. Our job was to translate them into decisions — thousands of small decisions — that would accumulate into something felt rather than merely seen.
Early concept work: mood board references alongside initial material samples, including the hand-woven Kenyan sisal that would become a recurring texture throughout the space.
The Material Language
Every project has what we call a material language — a set of textures, tones, and surfaces that work together to create a coherent sensory experience. For the Nakuru Penthouse, that language was built around three core principles: earth, craft, and restraint.
The palette is anchored in the colours of the Rift Valley at different times of day — the pale ochre of the valley floor at midday, the deep sienna of volcanic rock at dusk, the cool grey-green of the lake surface at dawn. These are not literal translations but emotional ones: colours that carry the memory of the landscape into the interior.
The Role of Handcraft
Perhaps the single most important decision we made was to commission every textile in the apartment from Kenyan artisans. The sisal wall panels in the main corridor were woven by a cooperative in Thika. The bedroom curtains were hand-printed in Nairobi using natural dyes. The dining chairs were upholstered in a leather sourced from a tannery in Machakos that has been in operation since 1963.
This was not simply an aesthetic choice, though the results are visually extraordinary. It was a philosophical one. The client's art collection represents decades of supporting African artists. It felt right — necessary, even — that the space housing that collection should be made the same way.
Key Principles Behind the Nakuru Penthouse Design
- All textiles sourced from Kenyan artisans and cooperatives, supporting local craft traditions.
- Palette drawn directly from the visual vocabulary of the Rift Valley landscape at different times of day.
- Art placement determined before furniture — the collection led the spatial arrangement, not the reverse.
- Every bespoke piece of furniture designed to be repairable and lasting, not disposable.
- Lighting designed in four layers: ambient, task, accent, and a fourth layer we call 'memory' — the quality of light at the golden hour.
The Reveal
On the morning of the reveal, our team arrived at the apartment at 5am. Not to make final adjustments — everything was in place — but because we wanted to experience the space in the early light before anyone else did. We wanted to be sure.
The client arrived at 10am. We had arranged for them to enter through the service entrance — an intentional choice, so that the first view of the completed apartment would be the one we had designed as the arrival moment: a long corridor, lined with the sisal panels, terminating in an open archway through which the valley was visible in full.
They stood in that archway for a long time without speaking. When they finally turned around, they were crying. So, quietly, was one of our junior designers who had worked on the project for its entire duration.
That is what we do this for.
The main living area, photographed at midday — the hour for which the lighting and palette were specifically calibrated.
What This Project Taught Us
Every project teaches us something we didn't know we needed to learn. The Nakuru Penthouse taught us several things simultaneously, some of which we are still processing.
It confirmed our belief that the most powerful interiors are not the ones that shout — they are the ones that whisper. The apartment has no statement pieces in the conventional sense. Nothing in it demands to be noticed. Everything in it rewards attention. That is a harder thing to achieve than spectacle, and a more lasting one.
It also reminded us that time is not the enemy of great design — it is often its essential ingredient. Eighteen months felt long while we were inside it. Looking at the finished space, it feels like exactly the right amount of time, not a week more or less.
