From the grandest of cathedrals and mosques to the simplest of dwellings around the world, you see evidence of how innate the sense of space is – it was there long before the era of CAD packages and computer drawings.”Architecture is about projecting our inner spiritual-emotional space into an outer space – it’s a manifestation of one’s inner way of being. I am one of the happy few who can visualise space the way a composer hears music Spatial sense is a language, an inherent capacity. I love this serene, elegant, inspiring space, which I feel is contemporary in the best sense of that term.”As soon as I saw the space, I knew what I would do with it Space is always an immediate experience. It was a minor feat of structural engineering – only the outer and the central load-bearing walls remain and the central one has been partially removed to create the 60-foot-plus reception space.
No sane human being would do that just to achieve the perfect apartment! It was a massive building operation, a hugely laborious and expensive process, but it has produced this spectacular result. There still isn’t!”I bought the apartment in 1999 and moved in the summer of 2000 It took about 10 months to restructure. I stripped the interior back to the brick and redesigned the floor space. All quite exceptional! This space appealed to me because in all of Hampstead, there wasn’t a garden-apartment space of this ilk. It had been so seriously neglected that even the plaster smelt But I could see its magnificent, ambassadorial potential. It had the feel of a one-storey house, because it had the imposing main front door to itself and the front garden and of course this haven of a completely secluded 120ft-long back garden.
Looking out into the garden of my home, you could be anywhere in the country.”When I first saw this space, it was a higgledy-piggledy mess that had not been touched for the last 40 years. Altai works mainly to private commission and creates gold and platinum jewellery, objets d’art and sterling-silver tableware
I have always lived in Hampstead. Before I moved to Wedderburn Road, a lovely leafy street of large Edwardian properties, I lived in a vast Victorian house in Well Walk. Hampstead is ideal because it’s close to the centre, but it is not an urban environment – it smells fresh, there is the Heath and Regent’s Park It’s idyllic.
