During the 2015 London Design Festival, Groves Natcheva Architects exhibited a short film they'd made, entitled Black Ice. Written by Adriana Natcheva's brother and shot entirely in his house – which the architects had designed, and located across the balcony from where Groves Natcheva is based – the film is a powerful study in dark, brooding suspense. Indeed, so much was made of the “psychotic” plot of Black Ice by certain elements of the design press, that perhaps the real essence of the film was missed.

Visiting Adriana Natcheva and Murray Groves in their Kensington studio, across the courtyard from the house that staged Black Ice, we launch straight into the whys and wherefores of the film's reception.

"We hope that it will open an interesting discussion as to where architecture is at; how it's presented. It hasn't happened yet," says Natcheva, somewhat ruefully. "It’s a question of opening the debate up into the creativity of an architect and the objects architects are trying to achieve. My instinct was to reach out to theatre and drama and film to show it to people so they can feel the architecture, without judging it as a piece of art in an abstract way."

At a very base level is Black Ice an advert? "We are not producing content and then attaching our name at the end of it," says Natcheva. "We're not selling that particular house – if anything, we are selling a way of thinking."

What is this “way of thinking”? The writer of Black Ice, Parashkev Nachev – an eminent neurologist, artist, and furniture maker, who also happens to be Adriana Natcheva's brother – corrects the press and lays the story bare. "If you treat the visual as decoration, you will lose the plot," Nachev says. "The fact that this happens to so many who view Black Ice with 'design' glasses on illustrates our cardinal point."

Does the Stage Set Itself?

Is Black Ice calling for a more poetic stance in the depiction of what architecture stands for?

"Adriana was the architect of my home," explains Nachev, "but since it is a home rather than an architectural showroom, the result is a fusion of my content and her form, rather like a play is the fusion of someone's script and another's direction. It is also a conveniently dramatic space, for it is designed to be like a stage, shrouded in darkness – its features visible only where and when specifically illuminated. The eye has insane dynamic range, far greater than any camera, yet we normally insist on flattening the visual with bright, uniform lighting, as if living were some kind of forensic audit. Few of the objects in the space are off-the-shelf, fabricated: they are handmade, mostly by me, to be lived with more than to be looked at. So the space itself is a criticism of the flatness and sterility of conventional architectural representation."