I’m Peter Lewin, the founder & designer of In Good Proportion.
Based near Islington in north London, In Good Proportion is an interior design studio for homes and boutique offices in London and across the United Kingdom. I design homes in good proportion: to their buildings, to the people who live there, and to what matters most in form and function.
To create a style that is uniquely yours, I learn what you like and why: what draws you to a particular look, and how you live. I do this through a structured approach of my own, which clients have found engaging and revealing. It lets me design your home through your eyes.
Next, I read the house, whether it's a Victorian terrace, a modern flat or a family house with an extension. Many newer flats were built to maximise yield, and proportion is how their awkward spaces are made to work. Where an extension meets the original house, proportion is also how the old and the new come to read as one. I then calibrate the features, colour, light and texture to the building and to how you live in it. It's a function of maths as well as taste, and it permeates the entire design process.
I'm candid about where to spend and where to save, so the focus of each room goes to what matters most. The aim is a home that holds up long after you move in.
Designing a home can be genuinely joyful, and it can also be stressful, with a lot of decisions and moving parts. My aim is to hold the vision, structure and detail so you don't have to. You work with me throughout, from the first conversation to the day you move in. The process stays collaborative and creative, and the result feels unmistakably yours.
I offer full interior design, as well as consultancy, whether for a focused question or to assess the potential of a home you're considering buying. Space planning, kitchen and bathroom design, and interior architecture are also available on their own. You can read more about my interior design services here.
Peter’s design journey
Perhaps unusually for a Californian baby, I was nursed in a Hans Wegner rocking chair. My Danish mother loved creating homes: first in a Scandinavian style, then in the Mediterranean house we built in a coastal California village, with tiles from Spain and chandeliers from France.
I began studying building and art history alongside economics at Columbia University, in New York City. There, I plunged head-first into the classical proportions of Bramante and Michelangelo, and the brutal beauty and exuberant materiality of America's pre-Columbian civilisations.
Over the following two decades in London, Paris and Brussels, I deepened that education through great houses and Art Nouveau gems. I even studied friends' homes, from freshly renovated London townhouses and flats to châteaux 300 years old, layered with generations of personality.
As a member of the Young Georgians and through other pursuits, I've come to believe that beauty comes from proportion. Individual style is how it's expressed. It's why I don't chase trends or fashionable brands: a home chosen for the moment soon falls out of proportion with the people who live in it. Georgian and Renaissance architecture remain a constant source of inspiration, for the way the structure of their volumes makes you feel: at once grand and grounded, inspired and at home. I'm drawn to the idea of procession: moving through a building becomes a series of experiences, from an enfilade revealing one room after another to a tight, dark passage opening into space and light, all bound together by coherence and flow.
My early work in interiors found expression designing, furnishing and renovating my own homes with growing focus and ambition. You can see how I approached my homes in Brussels and London in my portfolio. Studying interior design at Chelsea College of Arts acknowledged a course I was already on, and turned a private pursuit into a professional one.
In Good Proportion sits at the intersection of two minds: the creative mind that has spent decades inside the architecture and interiors of Europe, and the analytical mind that studied economics and spent a corporate career understanding what people want and why.
The result for clients is homes with ease, warmth and character, built with conviction around the people who live in them, underpinned by a process that is structured, transparent and centred on their needs.