This was one of those projects where there was a lot more to it than making a room look nice. Clifton House had these large, fairly underused landing areas that were basically just somewhere students walked through. The brief was to turn them into spaces that students would actually want to use — but doing that meant first working out how we could safely turn open landing areas into enclosed rooms. We installed four fire-rated walls, complete with matching doors and frames, so the new rooms worked with the building's fire-safety requirements and could be brought into line with building control.

Once the basic structure was sorted, the fun part was making each space work for a different purpose. We created a reflection space, games room, design studio and garden room, rather than just sticking the same furniture in four rooms and calling it a day. The layout of each one was driven by how students would actually use it — somewhere to sit quietly, somewhere to socialise, somewhere to work creatively and somewhere that felt a bit more relaxed and removed from the usual student accommodation environment.

Sound was another big consideration. These weren't originally rooms, so creating enclosed spaces meant thinking about how they would sound as well as how they looked. We incorporated soundproofing into the construction so that the new rooms could actually function without every game of pool, conversation or design-studio debate becoming entertainment for everyone else on the landing.

I also wanted to make sure the spaces offered something the students couldn't get simply by sitting in their bedrooms. The furniture, layouts and functions were all chosen around that idea. The design studio gives students somewhere to spread out and work, the games room is deliberately more social, the reflection space provides somewhere quieter to escape to, and the garden room uses the higher-level views and warmer environment to create a much more relaxed, almost tropical feel.

The garden room was probably the most obvious example of using the building itself to influence the design. As you move up through the building, the views change, and the top floor was naturally the warmest of the spaces. That made it the obvious place for the planting and more tropical feel rather than trying to force the same concept onto every floor.

For me, this project was really about taking space that wasn't doing much and making it earn its keep. It needed to be safe, properly constructed and acoustically considered, but it also needed to give students a reason to leave their rooms and actually use the communal areas. The finished result turned what had basically been large landing spaces into four completely different environments, each with its own purpose and personality.