Gesamtkunstwerk will revolutionise how you decorate your home — just don't ask us how to pronounce it

The majority of At Sloane's building and structure (except its façade) are François-Joseph Graf’s work.

(Image credit: ©MARINAGERMAIN)

Given that Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini, asserted that ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’, he’d presumably have taken a dim view of the Pontiac Aztek, which was designed, in 2001, by a focus group (and which was withdrawn after only four years).

Collaboration and consensus might be the buzzwords of our times, but there’s something dispiriting about anything that is the result of head nodding, especially in the world of architecture and design. Truly great buildings tend to be the result of a single vision. Architectural examples of Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of different disciplines and art forms where the contents were the result of considerable control freakery, range from Robert Adam’s Syon House in west London to Arne Jacobsen’s faintly Orwellian SAS building in Copenhagen, Denmark (he even designed the cutlery).

In between, there were similarly distinctive personal projects, such as Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Kensington home of the Victorian painter Lord Leighton and William Burges’s extraordinary transformation of Cardiff Castle into a Gothic fantasy for the Marquess of Bute.

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In the countryside, a garden and parkland were sometimes part of an even more ambitious masterplan. Although there were plenty of later examples to be found in Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and early Modernism, it’s a tradition that has become rare in the 21st century when the process of creating a house has become a shared endeavour between architect, interior designer and client. Except, that is, in the work of François-Joseph Graf, the French architect, designer and art collector, who designed At Sloane, whose talents were enlisted by the Cadogan Estate and the Parisian hotelier Jean-Louis Costes.

The majority of the building’s contents and structure (except its façade) are Graf’s work, creating a spatial and aesthetic coherence you might not expect in rooms heavily influenced by Thomas Jeckyll, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the same succession of space.

At Sloane Christmas decorations — At Sloane is a visual delight.

Like a cloistered monastery or riad, the leaded windows obscure the outside, encouraging guests to look in rather than out and to absorb the intimate world he has created. Like Soane, he is also a designer who understands that a little mirror goes a long way. Also like Soane, the result is not unhinged pastiche, but something beguiling and exciting, true to T. S. Eliot’s view that: ‘The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directed by the past.’

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Giles Kime is Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor, an expert in interior design with decades of experience since starting his career at The World of Interiors magazine. Giles joined Country Life in 2016, introducing new weekly interiors features, bridging the gap between our coverage of architecture and gardening. He previously launched a design section in The Telegraph and spent over a decade at Homes & Gardens magazine (launched by Country Life's founder Edward Hudson in 1919). A regular host of events at London Craft Week, Focus, Decorex and the V&A, he has interviewed leading design figures, including Kit Kemp, Tricia Guild, Mary Fox Linton, Chester Jones, Barbara Barry and Lord Snowdon. He has written a number of books on interior design, property and wine, the most recent of which is on the legendary interior designer Nina Campbell who last year celebrated her fiftieth year in business. This Autumn sees the publication of his book on the work of the interior designer, Emma Sims-Hilditch. He has also written widely on wine and at 26, was the youngest ever editor of Decanter Magazine. Having spent ten years restoring an Arts & Crafts house on the banks of the Itchen, he and his wife, Kate, are breathing life into a 16th-century cottage near Alresford that has remained untouched for almost half a century.