There is room for two pagodas in Gergei Erdei’s sitting room. They stand on polished wooden tables beside a white sofa, backed by gold screens. Above the cushions, a large painted panel fills much of the wall. It is a wonderfully extravagant arrangement for a home whose reported floor area is just 50m².

The artist and designer’s flat is in a Georgian building in Bloomsbury, London. House & Garden’s September 2026 profile describes a home with space for sitting, dining and working, a narrow kitchen and a sleeping area formed with cabinetry. Its scale makes the decorative ambition particularly interesting.

The sitting room in Gergei Erdei’s Bloomsbury flat, London. Photograph: Alixe Lay.

Look below those elaborate silhouettes and the arrangement becomes much quieter. The sofa, chair seats and cloth over the coffee table are all pale. Their broad, largely unpatterned surfaces give the smaller objects clear outlines. The room has plenty to look at, but the decoration is concentrated rather than scattered evenly across every available surface.

That distinction is useful if a small sitting room has become a collection of things you like without quite becoming a room you like. An ornate mirror or a favourite painting can be more satisfying with some plain fabric nearby. The aim is to make the interesting pieces easier to see, without requiring everything else to disappear.

The close-up of the sofa shows the effect particularly well. The cloth falls loosely over its arm, beside the crisp edge of a glossy wooden table. A pagoda rises against a flat gold panel, while the white window surround makes another broad, simple shape. There is contrast in texture and outline before the eye even reaches the patterned cushion.

Plain cloth gives the detailed objects around the sofa room to stand out. Photograph: Alixe Lay.

Speaking to House & Garden in 2022 about furnishing his London home, Erdei described spending a year finding furniture. He had gone without dining chairs for two or three months while looking for the right ones, buying through sources including eBay and Facebook Marketplace.

That is a more useful starting point than treating the photograph as a shopping list. A small room gives an awkward purchase very little room to hide. Waiting for a chair that fits the space can be more sensible than filling the gap immediately, particularly when that chair will be visible from almost everywhere else.

The scheme includes pieces designed by Erdei himself, and there is no verified budget for reproducing it. The freedom worth borrowing is to keep an object you enjoy, even when it falls outside the prevailing fashion.

Across the sitting room, a folding screen stands beside a cloth-covered table with a laptop on it. The dark illustrated panels give this working corner a definite edge; above them, the room remains visibly open. A pale rug marks the table’s position on the timber floor, and the white fireplace and oval mirror keep the darker wall from becoming a single blank expanse.

A folding screen gives the desk a distinct setting within the main room. Photograph: Alixe Lay.

The screen is part of Erdei’s collaboration with de Gournay, whose collection uses hand-painted and hand-embroidered finishes. It is a decorative object in its own right. Its broader lesson for a room that also contains a desk is to think about the view around the work surface, as well as the desk itself.

In an ordinary flat, a simpler screen could interrupt the view of a workstation from the sofa. Test its position with the chair pulled out and someone passing behind: the screen needs floor space too. We might also try moving an existing piece of art behind the desk to give the corner a more deliberate setting.

The kitchenette takes a restrained approach. Dark green cupboard fronts form a continuous run, interrupted by a pale worktop and small white tiles. The sink and hob are visible, yet their setting has much of the character of fitted hall furniture. After the sitting room’s display, this narrower passage offers a visual pause.

The kitchenette occupies a narrow passage in the same home. Photograph: Alixe Lay.

Colour distinguishes the adjoining spaces: House & Garden identifies Farrow & Ball’s Bancha around the entrance and bed, with Mahogany in the sitting room. The photographs show pale woodwork continuing through those changes. There is enough consistency to connect the views without making every part of the flat identical.

For someone choosing colours for a compact home, that is an appealing question to ask before buying paint: which details should continue from one space to the next, and where would a change be welcome? The answer will depend on the light and the views between rooms. Dark paint alone cannot supply this flat’s tall windows or generous ceiling height.

The final detail is at the bed. According to House & Garden, the back of a cabinet serves as the headboard. In the photograph, shallow shelves above the pillows hold books and a few objects; below them, a warm textured surface sits beside gathered fabric. The construction gives storage a finished face towards the sleeping area.

The cabinet’s back forms the headboard, with shelves above the pillows. Photograph: Alixe Lay.

This is the detail I would keep looking at. A divider has to be seen from both sides, and the side facing the bed has been treated as part of the bedroom. The storage is useful from the other side. From the pillow, it is simply a well-dressed wall.