Meridian 88: the Pub, the Number, and Why We Argue

The pathways

In Chinese medicine, meridians are the channels vital energy travels along in the body. An acupuncturist does not treat the place that hurts. They treat the point upstream, on the channel, where the flow has stopped moving.

We took the word because it describes what we do before we choose anything. Long before a finish, a fabric or a light fitting, there is a question about how a person moves through a room and what is standing in the way. Where the air comes in and where it leaves. Where daylight lands at four in the afternoon in November. The line someone walks from the front door to the kettle when they come home carrying two bags and a phone.

Most uncomfortable rooms are uncomfortable for reasons nobody can name. The sofa faces the wrong way and the room never fills up. The kitchen island sits in the walking line so everyone edges around it forever. The bathroom has no daylight and three downlights doing the work of a window. None of this is a decorating problem, and none of it improves when the walls change colour.

A room that fights the way people move through it stays uncomfortable no matter what goes on the walls.

Feng Shui gets treated in the UK as superstition about mirrors and water features. Strip the folklore off and what is left is a body of thought about orientation, ventilation and daylight that predates the building regulations by several thousand years. We use the methodology and leave the fortune telling.

The number

Eight is the lucky number in Chinese culture, for reasons that are partly linguistic and partly the sort of thing that becomes true through repetition. It is the number people pay extra for on a car registration or a phone contract. Doubled, it is the number people pay a great deal extra for.

There are two of us. That was the first reason.

The second arrived at the table. Turn an eight onto its side and it becomes the symbol for infinity, which is the kind of observation that sounds better after a Negroni than it does written down, and which we have kept anyway because it turned out to be the honest description of what a two person studio is. Two people, and no ceiling on what they might make.

The third we found much later, and cannot claim any credit for. Meridian has eight letters. Three eights in a name that was supposed to contain one.

Two answers

The studio exists because we disagree.

Alan trained in architecture and spent two years before that working with mainstream and SEND children, which is where the interest in how a space behaves under pressure comes from rather than how it photographs. The work strips back until the light is the only thing doing anything. Japandi, Scandinavian, mid century. Empty is a decision, not an absence.

Sookie came through hotel management, property development across China and the UK, and a period as an investment manager, which means the first question asked of any scheme is what it is worth and to whom. The work layers. Antiques, Chinoiserie, Art Deco, lacquer and brass and pattern, until every surface has a reason to be looked at.

Put those two people on the same brief and you get two entirely different answers. A Brutalist apartment in Canary Wharf briefed from the clients' monochrome wardrobe, and a one bed in the same postcode wrapped in burr walnut and olive velvet. A Japandi bathroom in terracotta plaster and banded onyx, and an Art Deco one with a fluted bath under an alabaster chandelier.

We argue about all of it. The scheme that gets built is the one that survives both of us, which is slower than either of us working alone and produces something neither would have arrived at.

What holds the two aesthetics together is not a house style. It is precision, the same attention to a shadow gap and a scribe line whichever direction a room is going in, and a shared experience of being East Asian in Britain and watching cultural reference get treated as a motif to be applied at the end rather than a way of thinking about space from the start.

The pub

The Seven Stars is on Carey Street, behind the Royal Courts of Justice, and has been there since 1602. It is small and low ceilinged and holds about forty people if nobody moves.

We had come from a course at UAL with no company, no clients and no idea whether two people with opposite instincts could work together at all. The name was written on the back of something, we no longer remember what.

The second Negroni is where the infinity part came from. We have not been able to prove it wrong yet.

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