Emma Burns' London flat is a masterclass in sophisticated small space style

Suitability, suitability, suitability," says Emma Burns, encapsulating her design philosophy. "Everything has to be appropriate to its surroundings and its architecture. You have to respond to the building, the brief, the client, the person who lives there. I approach every project in the same way." Her own London flat, a pied-à-terre where she spends her weekdays, embodies the smartness and efficiency of city life.

Emma bought the flat – on the second floor of an 1840s house in Bayswater – about seven years ago. Not far from Kensington Gardens (a convenient location for Dahlia, Emma's pug), it overlooks the spacious, leafy surrounds of Porchester Square. A graceful building with a beautiful cantilevered staircase and high-ceilinged rooms, it had suffered the usual unfortunate fate of houses chopped up into flats. "When I bought the flat it was like a rabbit warren, a complete mess," says Emma. "The bedroom was facing the square and the sitting room was facing the street, so my first priority was to change that back, to give the sitting room back its two big windows onto the square."

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Having reoriented the flat to her satisfaction, the next step was to make the most effective possible use of the small footprint. "You can't be indulgent in this sort of flat," she notes. "You have to be quite brutal and realistic with what you can achieve." The existing pine, country-style kitchen was swiftly dispatched in favour of sleek flat lacquered cabinets. "From the sitting room, it looks more like a bar than a kitchen," explains Emma. "And the bits where the mess happens are hidden behind the wall, so you don't feel that you're sitting in the kitchen when you're on the sofa."

This no-nonsense approach is evident throughout the flat. "I love having coat pegs in a country entrance hall, it feels so welcoming," she says, "but I hate the mess of that in London." A coat cupboard behind a jib door in the entrance hall solved that problem. Emma also sacrificed a bathtub in the internal bathroom in favour of a large shower with a simple glass screen – "this made the room visually double in size", she observes – and built in as much storage as she could manage to ensure that the space remained calm and uncluttered.

The sitting room is perhaps the most striking demonstration of Emma's clever way with space. Filled with an impressive amount of furniture, art, books and collected objects, it nevertheless looks calm, harmonious and comfortable. A generous L-shaped sofa wraps around the walls, and a bookshelf incorporates a small desk as well as plenty of storage. Another bookshelf was custom-made for the space between the windows, and Emma designed a banquette to go beneath it, so that the glass dining table could be squeezed in as close to the wall as possible. Deep, elegant cornicing and skirting boards, simple curtains and pale grey paint on the walls form an elegant backdrop to Emma's collections. Though there undoubtedly is a discipline to it, the process of arranging these things appears to be effortless. "It’s just about practising, non-stop moving things around and playing house," she says. "I really do believe that if you have a base of things you love, you can make it all work together."

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Smart and efficient as the flat is, the things that fill it give a strong sense of history and personality. "I made the patchwork textile on the headboard of the bed a million years ago, out of old fabric scraps and bits of my mother's dresses," she says, and indeed it features in a previous house of hers shot for House & Garden. Her collection of 20th-century art, shot through with vivid greens, is the centrepiece in the sitting room, while antiques picked up over the years each have their own absorbing character. An 18th-century chinoiserie chest facing the sofa is particularly striking, its deep black lacquer forming a foil to the more contemporary elements of the room, and looking, as Emma says "chic rather than old-fashioned."

With suitability at the heart of her ethos, Emma seems to have created the ideal pied-à-terre for herself and Dahlia the pug. "It’s like a very elegant hotel suite where everything is to hand," she remarks. "It's pleasing to be in alone, and equally so when other people are there. It's quite an elastic flat, and seems to expand and contract to fit whoever is there." She makes it sound like an attribute of the space itself, yet one suspects it was all part of the plan.

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