Gary and Karen Tarn's New York-style loft is in the unlikely setting of a former shower curtain factory.
Credit: Rachael Smith
The building that is now home to Gary and Karen Tarn and their two children was an architectural mess when Gary first saw it six years ago. 'An architect friend tipped me off about an industrial property that was soon to hit the market in west London’s Kensal Green,' recalls Gary.
'It was like an enormous shoebox divided horizontally in the middle with another tacked on the side, and the only way to get to the first floor was to use the outside staircase. The skylights were made of rotten steel that kept falling off, and the place was damp all the way through.'
A welder friend made the three-metre dining table from a leftover piece of damp-proof membrane encased in glass and some spare lengths of steel - the same way as the coffee table. The industrial look of the steel table legs is picked up in the curved lamp; a similar version can be found at Dwell.
But despite its obvious and unattractive drawbacks, Gary fell in love with the place. 'It was just so quiet, like a little oasis in the middle of the city. There's no road frontage at all and the building backs on to 13 gardens, so you feel you could be just about anywhere in the world.'
Another major point in the property's favour was that it already had planning permission for conversion to residential use. 'Once I'd bought it I just stood and looked at it and asked myself what on earth I was going to do,' says Gary. 'It was just an empty box and there were so many possibilities.'
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