Phillips House

Pierce Scourfield

• Architects

Located beside the northern corner of Crystal Palace Park, Phillips House is part of the Dulwich Wood Park estate, built in the late 1950’s to the design of architects Austin Vernon & Partners. Built with living rooms at first floor level, and bedrooms higher still, residents of the estate’s terraced homes are lifted to live amongst rich and beautiful tree foliage, leaving the smaller, short-ceilinged, ground floor spaces somewhat forgotten. Designed to hold an entrance hall, garage, and utility room, the weak point of the homes emerges from the resulting disconnection of occupants from their gardens. Brisco Loran were commissioned to bridge this divide through the rearrangement and extension of the ground floor, whilst works to the upper levels would create a single-bedroom loft extension, second floor office and new bathroom.

photo_credit Pierce Scourfield — Pierce Scourfield

Enabling works comprised the removal of four partitions, the ground floor’s rear facade, and an existing patio. Setting the floor level of the new space at a lower level created a taller ceiling, and a graded fall to the garden, whilst producing inset steps and a bench-height, stage-like, ledge across the living space.

Notable in the rearrangement of the plan is the establishment of five front-to-back-running bands of activity marked by doorways, steps, parquet patterning, mullions, and pebbled strips in the patio paving. Working within this framework, the former garage footprint has been reappropriated to form a shallow external bike cupboard, utility and storage rooms, and a guest bathroom. The former utility room at the rear has become a second living space, capable of serving as a bedroom for visiting family, whilst the sunken new-build space projects this living area into the garden where it might spill across the threshold to occupy the terrace in the warmer months.

The language of the extension is developed as an extrapolation of the qualities evident across Austin Vernon’s design. The expressed brick party walls are projected at ground floor to form the flank walls of the room, with a precast beam slung between to support the incoming timber roof joists. A screen of five glazed folding doors climbs to reach a shallow coping, with the beam and joist ends presented through the glass to the garden. Whilst permitting more daylight and view, the detail was developed to accentuate an adoption of the percussive beat of the row’s existing frames, mullions, and party walls.

A special quality of the project lies in the communal character of its boundary design, beginning with the approach to the party walls that were constructed astride the property line, and sufficiently founded to host the loads of future neighbouring extensions. On the south side of the garden terrace, a low wall and open fencing allows conversation between neighbours with a barbecue positioned to serve both gardens despite a pronounced step in levels. On the north side, a short bench forms the boundary where the adjoining families might spend time together. This bench and fencing draw their language from the estate’s original white-dowelled and square-framed joinery.