Sustainable Design — 4 min read — October 28, 2025
Inside Our Battersea Project: Embracing Eco-Friendly Finishes
How limewash walls, FSC-certified oak and natural materials created a healthier, more beautiful apartment in our Battersea interior design project.
A two-bedroom pied-à-terre in Battersea, recently completed, became an unexpectedly useful test of a principle we apply across most of our work: that natural materials do not merely look different from their synthetic equivalents, they behave differently over time, and that difference compounds over the life of a home in ways that are worth understanding before you commit to a specification.
The brief was for a calm, sophisticated apartment that took sustainability seriously rather than gesturally. What made the project interesting from a design perspective was how consistently the sustainable choice turned out to be the better material choice on its own terms, independent of any environmental argument.
Limewash
The walls throughout the main living spaces are finished in limewash rather than conventional paint, and they are the single most commented-upon element of the apartment. Limewash is made from heated limestone, slaked with water and thinned for application. It contains no volatile organic compounds, and as it carbonates on the wall it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, which is a genuine environmental benefit rather than a marketing one. None of which is why it looks the way it does.
Limewash has a depth and luminosity that synthetic paint cannot replicate because the finish is not sitting on the surface of the wall but bonding with it chemically. The result is a chalky, mineral quality that shifts throughout the day as light moves across it. The warm off-white we specified in the living areas reads almost as cream in morning light and takes on cooler, more neutral tones by afternoon. A deeper muted sage in the bedroom adds weight and definition without losing that characteristic sense of the wall breathing rather than being coated. Flat emulsion, however well applied, is static by comparison. Limewash is alive to the room in a way that becomes apparent only once you have lived with it, and it is very difficult to go back to conventional paint afterwards.
The Broader Material Palette
The same logic governed every specification in the apartment. FSC-certified engineered oak with a natural oil finish rather than polyurethane lacquer, because oil finishes can be spot-repaired over time rather than requiring a full sand and reseal when they wear, which extends the floor's working life by decades. Natural fibre textiles — linen, wool, cotton — rather than synthetics, because they regulate humidity, age with character, and do not shed microplastics into an already compromised urban air supply. Furniture sourced and manufactured locally where possible, and vintage pieces where not, on the basis that an object with forty years of use behind it carries embodied history rather than embodied carbon and tends to be better made than most things currently in production. The kitchen cabinetry is hand-painted timber — consistent with how we specify kitchens across most of our projects — chosen here as much for its longevity and repaintability as for its material credentials.
The Longer View
The conventional expectation with interior finishes is that they look their best on the day they are installed and then gradually decline. Synthetic paint chips and yellows. Polyurethane lacquer scratches and clouds. Plastic-based textiles pill and flatten. The maintenance model is cyclical deterioration and periodic replacement.
Natural materials follow a different trajectory. The aesthetic improves with use rather than despite it, which over ten or fifteen years produces an interior that feels richer and more settled than it did at completion. There is a persistent assumption that sustainable specification involves some kind of aesthetic compromise, a trade-off between doing the right thing and getting the result you actually want. This apartment is a useful corrective. What we found, consistently, was that the material decisions made for quality and longevity — the ones that would look and feel better in a decade — also turned out to be the more sustainable choices. Sustainability, it turns out, is not a constraint on good design. It is one of the more reliable routes toward it.