Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as home decoration. If a home is decorated it is not a home, it is an architect’s showroom, the owner becoming one of the exhibits, and – not having been chosen – the one with the weakest claim to belonging there. A home interior is a reflection of a man’s inner life and so has to develop as an organic part of him or else it is fake, the absurdity of an interior façade. It is not so for exteriors, whose intelligence is properly public, and where individuality is not to be sought but escaped from, in the way that only the synoptic impersonality of a good architect can achieve. But with an interior – to take an analogy from the stage – the architect can only be the director: the client has to write the script, often on the fly, as the play is being acted.

This space, then, like a life, is part accident, part design, part success, part error, part stability part flux. It emerged symbiotically from the architect’s fundamental organization of the space and light, and my incidental chaos of objects and darkness. Critical to the fundamentals was the partitioning of the total space – a simple rectangular prism – so that the individual volumes properly reflect their use. The bedroom is no bigger than the bed it is its sole purpose to enclose. The kitchen is optimized for monogamous dining. The bathroom is for bathing. This leaves the space devoted to life proper a 5 by 5 metre cube, more than two thirds the area of the entire floorplate. And critical to that vital room is the window, full height and large-panelled, exploiting the void left by an oversize door designed to be large enough to let in horses, for this was once a stable.

That light might at first sight seem to be wasted in the darkness of the envelope. But it is easy to forget that the eye does not care about brightness as much as about dynamic contrast. Seeing something depends on what else around it you do not see. By painting the walls of a space the canonical contemporary off white (or, worse, some violent colour) all one achieves is to compress the dynamic range, to flatten the contrasts of the objects enclosed by it. The result is a forensic visibility useful only for identifying objects, not for living with them. If we did the same for portraiture we would only ever do passport-style photographs.

Just as on a theatre stage, the framing of the action here is therefore dark and subdued. The walls, though left in raw brick to give a tactile relief, are painted flat midnight green: two coats of dark green with one coat of off-black. The floor is made from brown ebony, the wood of the South American Tranquillity Tree, dark and richly figured; except in the bedroom where the covering is thick tan bridlehide, simply cut in large pieces and stuck like linoleum. The ceiling is done in metallic bronze paint. Windows and shutters are in waxed mahogany, with unlacquered brass ironware.

A bright background smears lighting, for more light is reflected than hits the objects direct, and so the nature of the lamps matters little. Against darkness lamps become all important. But since their purpose is fundamentally to illuminate other objects, an economical aesthetic is thrown into difficulty. To make them look merely functional is no good, for the functional ideal of a lamp is a beam of light without a perceptible source. So one has to give them life besides illumination, but without altering their essence: not an easy task. No solution here can be perfect. We start with a geometric glass chandelier, a Venini piece from the 60s composed of a matrix of triangular prisms made from that liquid, achromatic glass one can no longer find in Murano. A square matrix suits the room, but the choice is deeper: matrices is what the mathematics of my research work are founded on. A pair of wall lights is made of parallel blocks of solid copper with a linear halogen light filtered through a stack of microscope slides, edge on, the filament shielded by a burnished leather strap. A solitary, central wall light, also my work, is two large isolated rings of copper, one cathode one anode to a set of low voltage side-silvered capsule bulbs mounted on the surface. I made four pendants in front of the bookcase that are simply bronze bulb holders on silk-covered cable, with side-silvered bulbs that shield the filament from the eyes without the boredom of a shade. Elsewhere there are assorted steel or bronze ship’s lights, stripped of their reflectors. On a shelf, I made an origami cube from folded bronze wire mesh housing an incandescent bulb. Many other lamps – for this space needs many more than we see here – are in progress.

This brings us to the furniture. In a small space it is natural to maximize surface while minimizing volume. I made an armchair from a pair of bent seamless mild steel tubes with a piece of nude bridlehide stretched between them, burnished with black wax. The desk is warm, thick, black perspex – not cold glass – transfixed by solid bronze rods held with black oxide steel clamping rings, and simply overlaid with surface-blackened leather, with a touch-to-open drawer built-in. In the kitchen, a folding table is made from an unusually wide single piece of ash that I scorched with a blow-torch to reveal the grain, in the Japanese manner; the kitchen surface and splashback are made from the same plank, scorched in the same way and waxed. Other pieces are from elsewhere: a geometric black stove (no home should be without a fire), an Alpine leather and horseskin couch, a steel and lacquer Willy Rizzo coffee table. The heavy manila rope, left over from an acoustic project, has found a home where it is, and is not to be dislodged. Books are on Vitsoe shelves, powder black. Horn loudspeakers, in rough touring black, are in transit to their permanent locations. Bathrooms ought to be for identification rather than narcissistic contemplation, and so this one is white, not black. Slabs of grey marble are set against white tiles. The metalwork is nickel, not chrome.