September 3, 2026 | DESIGN & INTERIORS
TWO WAYS of LIVING at the OWO
words Onur Baştürk
photos Julian Abrams (The OWO Residences)
At The OWO in London, award-winning interior design practice Goddard Littlefair has created two distinct private homes, each shaped around a different way of living.
London’s former Old War Office on Whitehall has an unusually strong architectural and historical identity. Now home to The OWO Residences by Raffles, the Grade II* listed Edwardian Baroque landmark also houses Raffles London.
For two private homes on the fifth floor, Goddard Littlefair resisted the idea of a single design language, using imagined residents as the starting point for two distinct interiors.
We spoke with founders Jo Littlefair and Martin Goddard about working within a building of such presence, deciding where contemporary interventions belong, and creating interiors that feel personal without becoming overly polished.
A BUILDING WITH PRESENCE
The OWO has an unusually strong architectural and historical identity. When designing a contemporary home within a building with such presence, how do you decide what to preserve, what to respond to, and where to introduce something entirely new?
JO: You have to earn the right to add anything new to a building like this. The proportions, the sense of gravitas, that's not something we were ever going to compete with, so the first job was listening to the architecture rather than ignoring it. Once we understood what the building was giving us, it became much clearer where a contemporary gesture could sit comfortably alongside it.
MARTIN: Our brief was to honour the history without letting it become a constraint. That's a fine line. We weren't interested in pastiche, and we weren't interested in ignoring 1906 either. Every material decision was tested against that context: does this feel considered within these walls, or does it feel like it's fighting them? The architecture gives you elegance, scale and proportion in spades, and we were very aware we were working within a building that has earned its place in London and in the nation. It demanded to be respected, and every choice was tested against that same question: did it sit in harmony with the building? At the same time, our ambition was to create genuinely desirable residences, so we wanted to peel back the stoicism of the building's exterior and deliver something welcoming and cocooning once you stepped inside.
Rather than create a single design language for the two residences, you imagined two very different ways of living. How did those fictional residents take shape, and when did they begin to influence the architecture, materials and objects around them?
MARTIN: We didn't want to default to one idea of luxury and repeat it twice down the corridor. So we asked who actually lives at an address like this, and the honest answer is more than one kind of person. That's really where the two residences began, not as two schemes but as two different sets of values.
JO: Once we had a sense of who each resident was — someone with a collector's eye and a more sociable, fluid way of living in 5.06, someone more introspective and structured in 5.08 — the decisions started making themselves. A cocktail cabinet becomes a display of things gathered through travel for one person, and a dedicated space for music and quiet retreat for the other. The character came first. I started looking at life through the lens of the characters we'd created, and the objects followed. It became a habit, thinking about brands, restaurants, London life, and what each of them would actually enjoy. I'm a bit of a magpie and a nostalgic dreamer at heart, and I believe being selective about what you surround yourself with connects you to experiences, to emotions, to your own values. Those are the touches that make a house feel like home, and they're deeply personal.
IT’S A QUESTION OF RESTRAINT
You describe the spaces as “composed rather than decorated.” What does that distinction mean in practice, particularly in a project where craftsmanship, collectible pieces and bespoke details play such an important role?
JO: Decorated implies you're filling a room. Composed means every piece is there because of its relationship to everything else: the piece beside it, the light above it, the surface it sits on. With this many bespoke and collectible pieces in play, that discipline matters even more, because it would be very easy to end up with a beautiful room that doesn't actually hang together.
MARTIN: It's a question of restraint, really. We had extraordinary pieces to work with — hand-finished joinery, vintage furniture, bespoke rugs — and the temptation with that level of craft is to let each piece perform. We wanted them to work as a group instead, so the atmosphere feels settled rather than assembled. No single element steals the show, because the moment it does, all the surprise and delight is given away in an instant. You have to work around a room and make sure every piece has been through the rigour of selection. Placing things together well is a craft that isn't easily learned. It's really like painting a three-dimensional picture, so that wherever your eye lands in the room, a colour or a detail connects it to something else.
TWO DISTRINCT MOOD, BOTH ROOTED IN QUIET LUXURY
The two residences have very different atmospheres — one lighter, more fluid and collected; the other darker, more structured and architectural. Beyond palette, which design decisions were most important in shaping each home's character?
MARTIN: Planning was just as important as materiality in the end. 5.06 is organised around a fluid sequence of spaces that supports informal entertaining, people moving easily between hosting, dining and lounging. 5.08 introduces much clearer moments of definition: a library wall, a dining booth, a separate den. That structure changes how a room feels to move through long before you consider what's in it. Before we even began, we spent real time thinking through the planning of both apartments. Historic buildings give you unusual spaces to work with by their nature, and with that comes opportunity. Working out where you can create moments of surprise and delight gives you a framework, and if that framework is right, the scheme you layer on top of it is already halfway to succeeding.
JO: Texture carried a lot of the character too. In 5.06, it's about layering upholstery, mirror and hand-finished silk panels to build softness and richness without heavy contrast. In 5.08, we let the materials sit deeper and darker and balanced that with tailored, clean-lined furniture. Two very different moods, but both are still quiet luxury. Neither one is shouting. The quality of the materials spoke to the calibre of the building itself, too. We were conscious throughout of choosing fabrics and finishes that respected The OWO and its stature.
EVIDENCE OF A LIFE
Contemporary luxury residential design can become highly polished yet somewhat anonymous. How do you give a newly completed interior a sense of life, personality and history of its own?
JO: You give it evidence of a life being lived, not just staged. Pieces that feel collected over time rather than placed all at once, a changing wall of artwork, glassware gathered through travel. Those details suggest a story before anyone's actually moved in, and that's what stops a finished interior feeling anonymous.
MARTIN: It also comes down to not smoothing everything into one register. A home with personality has small frictions in it: a slightly playful dining arrangement next to a more formal seating group, an antique mirror beside something entirely new. That's closer to how people actually live, and it's what gives a space warmth rather than polish for its own sake.
