Cassandra Ellis rewrites the story of a converted schoolhouse in Battersea

Before Cassandra Ellis begins her plans for any project, be they for her own interiors or her paint company, Atelier Ellis, she writes. “I pen a piece of fiction or non-fiction – a ‘word moodboard’, really,” she says, “and come out with something that encapsulates the design and how it is going to be.” Unlike other designers, Cassandra eschews Pinterest boards and sample trays, finding that the written word makes design easier and her interiors better, as her first conceptions of her projects come from her own thoughts rather than someone else's finished product. For her former house in Battersea, Cassandra stayed true to her writing practice, ultimately distilling her words down to a simple précis: “A place for learning and sharing.” Indeed, this phrase beautifully captures the space, nodding to the flat's history as a converted Victorian schoolhouse and its future as her family house.

Let us back up a bit. Long before Cassandra put pen to paper and her designs into action, the two-bedroom lateral flat sat empty for years. “It was done up in this faux country cottage style,” she says, “with lots of corridors and different rooms of varying sizes and shapes, which was very at odds with the flat's scale and its big school windows. Nobody would touch it because it was so tricky.” Another reason, perhaps, why no one before Cassandra dared to approach the flat was a tad more on the nose: the flat, left inhabited and derelict for so long, had accrued an overwhelming smell of excrement, with sewage from burst pipes spilling down the walls and into the hallways. However, neither the flat's mismatching style nor its offensive stench deterred Cassandra. Looking beyond its immediate flaws, she instead saw the perfect opportunity to redesign the space and find joy in its nuances. “I looked at it from an anthropological point of view,” she says, “With design, I am mostly interested in seeing how someone would like to live in a space. I did not want to design something just for looking at. For me with this flat, I knew immediately I wanted to make it the ideal space for our family, one we could really live in.”

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Before beginning on the flat's decoration, she first ripped out its original flooring. In its place, she Cassandra installed mixed-width English pippy oak from a sole mill source, Suffolk Timber. “Flooring is very important to me,” says Cassandra, “so unifying the apartment with one [type of] flooring was important.” Also important to Cassandra is sustainability, which is why she opted to use just one tree to make up the floorboards. “I hate waste. By using the whole tree, no two boards are ever the same, which gives the floor a sense of life – not just a thing constructed from another thing. Sometimes, people use natural materials beaten into submission to the point where you might as well have never bothered – I wanted the opposite for the flat.” Also banished was a “horrible cacophony of vile things”: shoddy veneers, weird mouldings and cheap-looking (but still expensive) tiles, which were replaced with British-made Marlborough tiles in one colourway. “I like simplicity of materials – and, where possible, I like to use British materials,” she says.

By now, it is easy to see that all of Cassandra's design choices are immensely thoughtful, and this is especially true of her lighting choices for the flat, which were particularly meditative. Repeat light fixtures by Isamu Noguchi and Charlotte Perriand are seen just about everywhere in the flat: the kitchen, bathrooms and hallways. “What I love about these lights – I've hoarded a stash of them, as you can see – is that you just cannot find anything better. I get inspired by them. They can sit in any type of property, from a Californian house like Sea Ranch or in an old Georgian. They are utter perfection.” Uninspired by both pattern and new fabrics ("It's a visual thing, for me,” she says), Cassandra steered clear of each, instead opting for hand-dyed versions to upholster her antique and contemporary furnishings – a task she bravely took on by herself. “I don’t like buying from chains. I don’t like buying anything that exists because a trend tells it to exist… I like making things,” she says.