The house, a grade 2 listed building designed by Ewen Christian, an RIBA president and Gold medallist who specialised in the design of churches, was built in 1881.
The four-storey house, with an area of around 900 sqm, had been converted into three flats. The brief was to return it to a single-family home and to add a new subterranean swimming pool to the side of the house and a garage for 3 cars over the pool. The house is now almost complete and the pool and garage will be completed in 2011.
The main focus of the design was to remove additions which were not part of the original design and to rediscover the original architectural forms, restoring them, as well as to design new internal areas using a contemporary language.
The rooms within the house have been re-configured so as to work for the modern life of a young family with its many and varying demands. One of the many challenges in this project was to obtain the necessary consents for the works on a prominent building on a corner site in a very sensitive conservation area in Hampstead, immediately next to Hampstead Heath and in a neighbourhood where everybody had an intense interest in the house.
