Interior design ideas: how to transform a Victorian warehouse for just £800 - in pictures

Product designer Bobby Petersen has creatively and cleverly transformed the living space in the former industrial warehouse he rents in Tottenham, north London. Experimental and knocked together out of salvaged materials, the pendant lights constructed from cardboard and strong glue are typical of Petersen’s approach to the refurb, which has cost him only 'around 800 quid'. Photograph: Ida Magntorn

Product designer Bobby Petersen in his Tottenham loft Photograph: Anna Huix

Petersen’s live/work space is furnished as it is out of necessity. 'My inspiration? It was about making do with what I had,' says the 29-year-old product designer. The flat, in a Victorian warehouse block in a shabby backstreet yard, accessible through graffitied metal gates, was a shell, with one room on one level. Stark and strip-lit, there was a basic kitchen and a scruffy shower room. 'It was a mess,' Petersen says, 'and kids had gone over the walls with spray cans.' Now it is airy and welcoming, with plants and a Scandinavian flourish. The work, which he did himself while studying for his MA, took a month. The main bedroom is suspended from the ceiling and features a giant wall flap operated by a concrete-weighted pulley. Photograph: Ida Magntorn

Petersen’s knack for canny reappropriation is perhaps his biggest weapon against spending money. The shelves on one wall were the dining table-top until a few weeks ago. 'I needed some order,' he says. Photograph: Ida Magntorn

The bedrooms are accessed by vertigo-inducing ladders. The mezzanine above the kitchen, outside the second bedroom, is Petersen's compact work space. Photograph: Ida Magntorn

Even some of the plants – which sprout from pots, giant food tins and seaside buckets, and climb up the walls by the windows – were free. 'I found a fallen passion fruit on the street,' he says, 'so I put it in my pocket – and forgot about it until weeks later when I put my hand into the mush.' But the seeds were all right and so he planted them. These, along with chilli and avocado, grow from handmade wooden troughs attached to ceiling girders. Photograph: Ida Magntorn

The bedrooms are accessed by vertigo-inducing ladders. The mezzanine above the kitchen, outside the second bedroom is Petersen's compact work space. Photograph: Ida Magntorn