Atelier Mar.

The flat was three small rooms and a corridor under the roof of a 1970s block, with the best view in the building hidden behind a bathroom wall. The client, who founded the gallery Atelier Mar Ceramics, wanted to live with around two hundred pieces without the apartment ever feeling like a store room.

We took out every partition but one and divided the space by height instead: living at table level, the collection on deep shelves above, and nothing between the sofa and the sea.

We replaced four small windows with a single opening, eleven metres long and 1.4 metres high, set low enough that from the sofa you see only water. Its oak sill is sixty centimetres deep and runs the full length, a shelf for the pieces she is living with that month.

The lacquered surfaces are angled to catch the reflection of the sea, so on bright mornings the white living room takes on a faint blue.

The joinery walls are finished in white lacquer, hand-rubbed in nine coats to a soft sheen that never competes with the glazes on display. Floors are oak, laid in herringbone in the dining corner and in long boards elsewhere; the kitchen island is a single block of grey limestone on dark tiles.

The dressing room is lined in glass-fronted oak cabinets lit from within, so clothes and a second shelf of ceramics share the same quiet light.

The shelving, the dining bench and the island base were built by a local boat carpenter from oak seasoned in his own yard. The cabinet pulls were thrown and fired by one of the ceramicists the client represents.

The collection now changes with the seasons. Pieces come down from the high shelves, spend a month on the window sill, and go back up in the light they were seen in.