Koya co-founder Shuko Oda on the mid-century pieces that fill her 1960s townhouse in Forest Hill, south-east London
“My husband Nick and I were living in Peckham when we decided to buy a house together. We hadn’t been to Forest Hill much but had always remarked on the lovely 1960s houses whenever we’d pass on the bus.
“The house is on a cul-de-sac in a wooded area and was built between 1959 and 1962. Nick likes to collect things; for a long time it was mid-century objects and furniture. Our one-bed flat in Peckham had enough stuff to fill a whole house. When we came here, I knew we’d found the perfect place for our pieces.
“There are a number of things that we particularly like about the house: the “wall” of glass that looks out from the living room into the garden, bringing the outdoors in, and the communal space at the front where everyone on the street congregates in the summer and the kids play and grow together. There’s a real sense of community, with everyone appreciating and being grateful for the place we all live.
“One of my favourite pieces in the house is our extendable teak dining table, designed by John and Sylvia Reid for Stag Furniture in the 1960s. It’s from their S Range, which has recently been reissued, but ours is original. We like the combination of its colour and materials, and the simplicity of the design. The frame is made of tubular steel legs with a teak top, and we have the matching chairs, which have a teak back and leather cushioned seats.
“I love sitting at the table, drinking tea or coffee and just looking out into the garden, which is very green and backdropped by large, mature trees. It’s often my only quiet moment in an otherwise hectic day.
“The dining table is where a lot of our life takes place. I try to make sure we all have breakfast together at home, which is something my parents always made time for when I was growing up in Japan. If it’s a working day, it will just be coffee and toast.
“At the weekend we sometimes make a traditional Japanese breakfast, with rice, miso soup, pickled umeboshi plums, grilled fish, a fried egg or a bit of ham and some natto, which is fermented soya beans. Sometimes it’s just pancakes.
“If we’re having people over to eat, I prefer it to be on a Saturday so that I can completely relax on Sunday. I love cooking Middle Eastern food at the moment, so a typical meal will be four or five vegetable-focused dishes like sumac tomatoes, roast aubergine dip, roasted vegetables with yoghurt, green sauce and dukkah, followed by pistachio and rose petal ice cream.
“We got very lucky with this place because a lot of the other houses on this road had been renovated and their original features removed, whereas ours is pretty much intact. Any changes made over the years seem to have been done sensitively. It means we still have features like the sideboard in the main living space downstairs. It’s the perfect setting for pieces such as the Philips desk lamp, which Nick thinks was designed by Louis Kalff in the 1950s.
“Upstairs, the landing has three glass panels that run the length of the staircase. Again, these are original and mean that the house feels light and open – a lot of people take out the panels to make way for an en suite bathroom.
“I like that our pieces all have a story, and how the house matches or enhances that. The stabile we have downstairs, for example, is by a little-known constructivist artist called Raymond Elston, who exhibited at Adrian Heath’s studio in the early 1950s, along with Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. We bought it 15 years ago from a dealer in Camden Passage; everyone enjoys how the shadows dance and move on the wall whenever the door to the garden is open and air moves around the house.
“Next to the stabile is a small wooden sculpture of an organic form by a Japanese artist I know, Masaya Hashimoto. He married a close friend and they moved into a Buddhist shrine in the hills outside Tokyo some time ago. He has a studio there and usually makes very fine sculptures from bone, but the last time we visited them at their home he showed us all these wooden shapes that he’d been working on. They’re so smooth and tactile that Nick and I wanted to get one straight away.
“Unfortunately, both the stabile and sculpture have to be kept up high, as they’re too tempting for our children to touch. They’ll come down one day, I suppose.”
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