Rotunda Bookroom

A few years after the success of my exhibition bathroom (see Neoclassical Bathroom), Fleur Rossdale offered me one of the principal spaces in The British Interior Design Exhibition.  Having recently designed a circular library in a house in Hampstead which was not built due the client’s financial difficulties, I decided to design a Rotunda Bookroom for the exhibition as I had already invested a lot of time and thought into the details of that project.

One of the advantages of designing this room is that the height of the room was unrestricted, allowing me to include a domed ceiling, and a cupola (skylight) with special computerised lighting effects to give the impression of dawn to dusk in 10 minutes!

The room won The World of Interiors award for the best room, and was voted the best room by all the other designers in the exhibition.  It gained an enormous amount of publicity, appearing in magazines all around the world.  The room was actually designed so that it could be dismantled and re-erected in another dwelling.

One of the advantages of designing in a Neoclassical style is that the finished result hardly dates.  This room could easily have been designed yesterday when in fact it was designed in 1990.