Extensive refurbishment, rear extension and landscaping works to a large terraced house in North London. The project aims to mediate between the distinctive character of the existing house, and the new extension.
The home’s kitchen, living and dining spaces have been relocated to the basement floor, level with the reworked garden. Bedrooms and additional living areas are on the ground and first floors, connected by a dramatic central stair that has been refurbished to highlight its original Edwardian features.
The client’s initial brief was to affordably modernise the historic house and create comfortable and connected living spaces with better correlation between house andgarden. Inside, the original townhouse layout was dark and disconnected. Outside, the east-west Edwardian street layout inscribed on the northern slope of Crouch Hill causedthe back gardens to fall away sharply to the rear, meaning the entrance level was one storey higher than the garden level. These issues have been addressed by reinterpreting the typical domestic spaces of the townhouse typology and creating a dramatic sequence of connected volumes and views with internal and external cuts.
The home’s new layout is a mix of open and broken plan design, with double-height ceilings and windows to the rear and a newly cutout mezzanine that allows for light to enter deep into the plan.
The kitchen sits below this mezzanine, playing with levels and views – a sleek timber and black steel stair case draws the eyes up to the ground floor, and fully glazed doors demarked with astragal bars look onto the newly level garden. An attached, enclosed dining area has custom furniture and lighting designed collaboratively by the architects and clients. Here, a long dining table is punctuated with an oriel window framing views of the garden.
Throughout the home, design patterns and motifs run across internal and external finishes, giving a sense of continuity and expressing the transition from the original Edwardian elements to contemporary interventions. Most prominent is the subtle yet ubiquitous chevron pattern,visible in the restored turn-of-the-century parquet flooring, which is echoed in the brass-inlaid concrete on the lower ground floor. The 45-degree angle of this pattern is transformed again into a triangular waveform of charcoal-colouredporcelain tiles and black zinc apron on the dining room exterior.
“Marking tension between the existing Edwardian house and the new addition was important to us. Using different materials, but applying them in the recurring chevron pattern allows the old and the new to have distinct identities but for the whole house to read as one entity,”
The chevron anglealso sets the pitch of the dining room roof gable and the layout of garden paths and planting.Importantly, thepitch coincides with the falling ground levels, producing a massing that is not overbearing on neighbouring gardens. The overall relationship between home and garden was critical, as the clients saw it as another living space. The clever use of brass strips which extend from the kitchen floor out into the garden blur the lines between inside and out and extend the spatial threshold.
Simple colours and materials are employed throughout the home, a nod to Edwardian design restraint. Doorways, windows and stairs are lined with black steel or painted timber, and polished concrete and oak flooring, in the living/dining space and bedrooms respectively, meet pristine white walls. Copper fixtures pop against the refined palette.
Merrett Houmøller Architects’ scheme also incorporates two flexible home working spaces, one within the converted front basement and another in a partially-sunken studio cabin, clad in EPDM rubber, at the rear of the garden.
Material Used :
1. Zinc roof: ElZinc Standing Seam Roofing
2. Polished concrete flooring: Mapei
3. Wall finish to bathrooms: Tadalakt
4. Oak chevron parquet flooring: Havwoods
5. Bathroom tiles: encaustic tiles by Bert and May
6. Glazing: Crittal
7. Garden building cladding: Hertalan EPDM
8. External wall tiles: Grestec Lavarra chevron porcelain tiles
9. Frameless oriel window: Maxlight
