Selected work — 01
The Slate Residence
A double-height family house, brought to stillness around slate, marble and leather.
Generous volumes, a material spine, and a few decisive pieces.
The house arrived with height and light and little else. J16 Designs gave it a spine of honest materials — cleft slate, black marble, smoked timber and leather in oxblood — and let each room settle around one or two pieces that carry it: a cascade of bronze rings in the living room, a stone table in the dining room, a floating bed facing the water upstairs.
Everything else is proportion. Floors run uninterrupted from the entrance to the pool terrace; curtains fall the full height of the void; art is hung sparingly and lit well. The result is a family home that feels resolved before you notice why — the J16 signature, at the scale of a whole house.
01 — Arrival
The living room rises through two storeys.
Beneath a cascade of bronze rings, a black leather chaise, linen sofas and a saffron-veined marble table hold the floor. A glass balustrade keeps the upper landing light; the curtains drop the full height of the void.
02 — The dining room
A wall of cleft slate gives the house its name.
Against it: a table in black marble, chairs in oxblood leather, a single linear pendant, and floating black shelves for the things worth looking at. The glass doors open the room to the pool terrace.
Stone that was quarried in sheets, laid so the light rakes across it — the whole room takes its temperature from that wall.
03 — A room for art
Colour is left to the paintings.
The sitting room is hung with contemporary African painting — a triptych over the low sofa, a mother and child in emerald cloth beyond — and furnished in bouclé, tan and stone so the canvases carry the colour.
04 — The principal suite
A floating bed, facing the water.
A perforated charcoal screen wall anchors the bed; two low loungers face the window and the lagoon beyond. Through the glass, the dressing room is a lit gallery of wardrobes around an island in dark timber.
05 — After hours
A cinema under a field of stars.
Leather recliners beneath a fibre-optic ceiling; next door, a media lounge lined in vertical timber slats, with the green painting given a wall of its own.
06 — Kitchen & guest suite
Handleless, in taupe and stone.
A waterfall island under two smoked-glass pendants, cabinetry without a visible handle; the guest bedroom keeps the same calm in softer tones.
07 — After dark
At night the house turns to the pool.
Lit volumes doubled in the water, loungers on the terrace, planting kept low so nothing competes with the architecture.
