Our film series is back, and this time we’re visiting the upside-down home of architect Barbara Weiss, who lives with her husband, property developer Alan Leibowitz, in a converted pub in Westminster, central London. Check out the film here.

As head
of her self-named practice, Weiss oversees a spectrum of different projects,
which might take the form of a reimagined listed family house in north London,
the sensitive restoration of Norman Shaw’s 1882 home (now part of Imperial
College), or work on the Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial
institution. Tying them all together is a simple, clean touch, one in which her
love of modernist greats like Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray makes itself known
through minimal detailing and in-built functionality.

When it
came to her own home, Weiss decided to undertake the ambitious task of
converting a one-time pub in the heart of Westminster after 25 years of living
in a Victorian terrace in Islington, north London. “I loved it, but one morning
I emerged from the tube at Green Park and felt I was missing the best of
London. Alan had been brought up in South Africa, in a big house in the
suburbs, so he was happy, but I wanted to be back at the heart of things,” she
told World of Interiors magazine in 2014.

Placing
themselves in the thick of it came with the challenge of carving out privacy
and a garden from the building, which had been used as offices as well since it
was built in 1927. The solution was to design an upside-down house, one in
which the top floors are given over to the core living spaces and roof garden,
and the street-viewing ground floors reserved for bedrooms and ancillary
spaces.

Weiss’ affinity for modernist architecture drove much of the design, with a Corbusier staircase pinched from his Fondation in Paris being “the vertical thread that connects these floors”, and an honest material palette that preferences natural choices like cedar, oak, marble and bronze.

Step
inside Weiss’ design and hear her thoughts on urban gardening, good interior
design and modern living by watching the film now. And don’t forget to
subscribe to our YouTube channel where
you can step into the homes of Ruth and Richard Rogers, Deyan Sudjic, Roger Zogolovitch and
many more.