Concrete Values

London designers Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien’s Barbican apartment brings Brutalist architecture to life. Nonie Niesewand sneaks a first look

“The Barbican is a bit of a maze,” cautions designer Nipa Doshi ahead of our interview. She should know, since it’s also her home. Built in the 1970s, the multi-layered complex, which houses over 2,000 apartments alongside art galleries, cinemas, a library, theatre and concert hall, remains London’s best example of Brutalist architecture. On a grey day, its concrete towers can be forbidding. Ziggurat teeth on balconies reach for the sky, and walls hammered by hand with picks to resemble the moon’s pitted surface seem straight out of a sci-fimovie.

Design duo Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien, whose hero Le Corbusier coined the Brutalist label with his bare concrete (or Béton brut) buildings, love the modernist vibe of the Barbican. “Outside, the Barbican looks uniform, and inside the interlocking volumes are so intelligently designed,” adds Levien about their home. Since 2017, the couple and their 10-year-old son, Rahul, live in a triplex apartment bathed in natural light in one of the lower blocks, just six floors above the gardens. The walls and ceilings are white, floors silvery silicone, and shoes, in true Indian style, are left at the front door. It’s like stepping into a gallery of contemporary design furnished with a mix of mid-last-century modern classics and some of their own works. “Inside our triplex, there are no doors or walls defining different spaces yet you have privacy and noise control as each floor has its dedicated function,” says Levien about their fluid living space. “The stairs make tremendous vertical connections across three floors of open-plan living.”

LAWS OF ATTRACTION