WHEN Lucho Brieva first set eyes on the disused office block, he knew he had to have it. He was looking for a place to house a metal workshop and the overflow of guests from the St John’s Wood home he shared with his then wife and mentor, singer Chrissie Hynde. He wanted somewhere to work, combining metal and glass to create pieces such as dining tables, candelabra and even showers.

In 1998, the three-storey Kilburn property was “a bargain” at £700,000. Set in a secluded courtyard, the 10,000sq ft Victorian building was originally constructed as stables and a railway depot. When he bought it, it was in a parlous state with smashed walls, broken floors and dangling neon lights. But it had the space, off-street parking and location he wanted. There were no planning objections to his proposed change of use, and so, a few weeks later, Colombian-born Lucho, 38, set to work with three labourers.

Brieva – who trained as an architect and worked as a boat interior designer before becoming a singer, philosopher and metal artist – decided to gut the property himself. He redid the wiring, plumbing and plasterwork, introduced soundproofing to make way for a state-of-the-art recording studio on the top floor, constructed partitions in the open-plan apartment, made a metal workshop and gallery on the ground floor and laid new floorboards and wooden floors. The project took two years and cost £180,000 (the building is now valued at £1.6 million). “It wasn’t stressful,” maintains Brieva, “because I wasn’t living on site.”

Then, in 2001, he split up from Hynde. “I decided to move into the apartment. We’d moved home every year for six years. Chrissie was always looking for the perfect house,” explains Brieva. “I got exhausted and hated maintaining huge properties. So now I like having a compact, manageable home.” The apartment is about 2,000sq ft. If he tires of “compact” living, he can go upstairs to the recording studio, where he is working on an album with Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, or downstairs to the gallery, which he uses for art shows, parties, lectures, dinners and as a library.

The apartment is a peaceful, airy, open-plan space with earthy and neutral colours and dark wooden Junckers floors throughout. The look is East meets quirky West.

There are cream sofas, 19th century French radiators, a piano and a wall of windows hung with wooden Luxaflex blinds to hide the railway. And Brieva’s imaginative creations – from a steel-frame dining table with a Venetian glass top lit underneath by tiny ruby bulbs to a kitchen splashback of glasslike polycarbonate illuminated alternately by pink, blue or yellow back-lighting. “Lighting is incredibly important,” explains Brieva. “At the flick of a switch, you can visually change the size of a room and create a space that is sensual, mystical or a workspace.”

He designed a kitchen at one end of the apartment, a sitting room at the other and constructed a low “wall” of painted cupboards to define the bedroom area. He then fashioned a Japanese-style screen from steel frames backed with polycarbonate to partition off the bathroom. There are no internal doors apart from this one. He decided on the layout by using his architectural experience and “intuition”. “I wanted the energy to circulate,” explains Brieva, a former martial arts champion. “I used proportions that are based on sacred geometry from ancient civilisations.”

Amazingly, Brieva made all the fixtures and furniture, except the sofas. His bathroom is like a solo art show. A font-style MC Stone basin of limestone sits on a square, red light-box, just waiting to be transferred to a modern cathedral. (“The circular basin placed on a square base symbolises the marriage of heaven and earth,” says Brieva.) He has encased a double-ended Bette bath in a front panel of milky Perspex, and lit the marble walls of his shower from behind the rock. “It looks beautiful and makes the stone warm.” Only the lavatory remains unreconstructed.

Turning his hand to kitchen-making, Brieva put sapele wood work surfaces and eye-catching copper doors on cheap units. He fitted a chessboard floor made of slate framed with cherry wood. He continued through the sitting room, fashioning iron dagger-shaped wall lights and personally constructing a painted MDF sideboard and chunky floating bookshelves. Outside he created a Piranesi-inspired wrought-iron balcony for his bedroom window.

Inside the bedroom – a monastic, calming place with rough cream plasterwork walls, Moroccan lanterns and Ganesh (god of business) beside the bed – Brieva made something surprising. He pulls forward a large Sufi oil painting of a sacred lotus and the birth canal to reveal a cupboard… containing 40 gleaming knives for his martial arts fights. “Lucho means ‘I fight’ in Spanish,” he laughs. He needed that warrior spirit to turn a lousy office into a beautiful work/play/live space.

GET THE LOOK
Lucho Brieva: open by appointment, the gallery shows Brieva’s work and he undertakes private commissions such as his dining table with its Renaissance pillar-style copper legs embedded with blue glass (£2,000), giant candelabra (£2,500) and iron and illuminated glass-framed shower (£3,500). Call 020 8960 2794.
MDF shelves and cupboards: John Murray, known for excellence in design and craftsmanship (07773 361568).
Lighting: at-the-touch-of-a-button dimming and pre-set lighting scene selection from one stylish wall control by Lutron Lighting Control, changing mood and visual space (0800 282107).
Cast-iron reclamation radiators: Brondesbury Architectural (020 7328 0820).
Wooden blinds: Luxaflex (0161 432 5303).
Bathroom: MC Stone for Bette double-ended Starlet bath and font limestone basins (020 7289 7102).