Engaging extensions

The "screen" towards the gardenAn intervention is made to a small-scale amorphous building accommodating an individual house. The interventions and additions made over time created a garage and a series of annexes in different shapes and sizes, placed without any particular rule in mind. The project aims to perfect the house filling it with functional spaces while also cleansing and organising the exterior space of the patio. The main volume of the house and the garage are thus further preserved.In the interior space, the intervention brings a spacious living area, attached to the main volume at the same time opening towards the exterior on all its three sides. The shape is so conceived in order to generate an ample interior space while dir... More

Dedicated to the oeuvre of a Jewish artist put to death at Auschwitz, the Felix Nussbaum Museum is an extension to the Cultural History Museum in Osnabrück, Germany, where Felix Nussbaum was born in 1904. As well as displaying paintings created by Nussbaum, the museum presents changing exhibitions focusing on the themes of racism and intolerance. With sudden breaks in its pathways, unpredictable intersections, claustrophobic spaces, and dead ends, the structure of the building reflects the Nussbaum’s predicament as a Jewish painter in German before WWII. Visitors enter by a tall and narrow central corridor, whose concrete exterior is a blank canvas and whose interior is a constricted space without horizon, evoking a visceral sense of ho... More

A family home full of nooks and crannies for clients with an eclectic collection and a love of display. Nooks and crannies permeate and define the extension and refurbishment of this terraced house. Through a series of structural alterations we formed a series of elegant, open plan and light filled spaces conceived as a series of nooks from the scale of a room down to the home for a favourite bowl. A large ash framed glazed door and windows frame views of the garden through the house and from the entrance. We designed the kitchen as a gallery for an eclectic cookware collection and allowed these to decorate the space. The project experiments, combining stainless steel, birch faced plywood, grey mdf, cement tiles and a cast in-... More

29-Dec-2016 Every architectural project carries within it the acknowledgment of the boundary as a concept, which determines its spatial and formal configuration. Whether the materialization of that boundary should occur in a clear or blurred manner, with strength or gentleness, expressing lightness or weight, is not a minor decision, because it reflects a specific stance when addressing the multiple discontinuities that contemporary cities face today. In a few cases these discontinuities are juxtaposed in a clear and yet harmonious way, as in the strip of land where Mount Urgull meets the historic center of San Sebastián: between nature and city; the horizontal plane and topographic elevation; land and sea; historical buildings and current... More

A larch clad extension to a Victorian Terrace House in Wandsworth. Joint Winner of NLA’s Don’t Move, Improve ! competition for the best home extension. “Extremely playful and original, but respectful at the same time” An extension to a Victorian terraced house to form a light filled kitchen and family room integrated into a redesigned garden area. The intention was to replace, enlarge and improve a dark kitchen area to form a new informal living space with direct access to the garden and to open up views through the ground floor of the house to the garden. The existing ground floor was expanded sideways into an unused yard area and backwards into an area formerly occupied by an outside WC. An internal light well is formed whe... More

The Round Tower is a Grade II Listed folly, which had been reduced to ruin by years of neglect and fire. Located on the crest of a hill overlooking Siddington Village, the exposed site is visually integral to the setting of this listed structure. As such the design approach maintains the open relationship with the surrounding agricultural landscape by developing a discreet and substantial underground extension to the tower. This underground extension provides the main open plan living spaces and is lit by both a central open sunken courtyard and a lateral ‘landscape scoop’ concealing the new swimming pool and associated sun terraces from public view. The listed tower remains clearly the dominant structure, providing the front door t... More

London-based practice De Matos Ryan has renovated and extended a Grade listed country house estate in Gloucesteshire, Home Farm, bringing it up to date for 21st century living. Home Farm comprises a Grade II listed eight gabled main house and two outbuildings, set in a landscape neighbouring a Grade I listed Church in the Cotswolds. De Matos Ryan have remodeled the main house and added a contemporary garden pavilion which functions as a link building, consolidating the estate whilst housing a new open-plan kitchen and living room. The house dates from the 16th Century and was extended in the 17th Century. Having suffered considerable neglect over many years it required a complete refurbishment. It has been restructured internally a... More

The Dordrechts Museum accommodates one of the most important collections of Dutch Masters in The Netherlands. The existing building – an asylum, converted to a museum in 1904 - had become too small to show the collection and temporary exhibitions at the same time. Also climate control was primitive, preventing the exchange of paintings with foreign institutions. The building has been extended and restored. It now offers the visitor a continuous route. In the extension, this circuit opens up into a ‘clear labyrinth’ allowing visitors to make their own journey through the exhibitions. Interventions are in clear contrast with the existing monument: The floating, ‘stealthy’ box of the extension has a strange, silent expression, while hiding t... More

Having completed a number of projects with Tom Russell Architects, we were asked to build a contemporary frameless glass extension to the rear of a large Victorian townhouse. Two oak boxes frame a protruding glass cube, to create a beautiful light space, requiring some very well executed construction details. moon designed and built various items of bespoke fitted furniture, as well as a system of clever sliding door panels which separate the extension from the rear living space in the winter months. Transforming the basement into a self-contained guest flat required tanking throughout to resolve a persistent water penetration problem. More

Founded in 1957, the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College serves as the University of Oxford’s facility for research and teaching on the Arab world, Iran, Israel and Turkey from the 19th century to the present day, with its focus on the research of humanities and social sciences. The centre has been housed at 68 Woodstock Road (the former rectory of the Church of St Philip and St James, built in 1887) since 1978. The Middle East Centre holds Oxford University’s primary collection on the modern Middle East, a world-class archive of private papers and historic photographs used by scholars and researchers with an interest in the region. The centre’s research core is the specialised library, document and photographic archive covering mater... More

The project is the extension and refurbishment of a detached house from the 1920’s in Chaville (Paris Western suburb). The extension is a concrete volume inserted between the eastern facade of the existing house and the adjoining wall of the next house, in continuity with the front facade of the existing house. The suspended dual aspect room receives southern and northern light and is used by the owner -a cello player- as a rehearsal room. The inner surfaces of the concrete canopy resulting of the southern facade shape are covered with a layer of anodized aluminum. The space under the extension is a parking place, the front and rear doors are made out of expanded aluminum and can be both opened to become a sheltered outside space opening on... More

Situated in a Conservation area at the edge of Brook Green in West London, this stunning house was DOS Architects’ first residential refurbishment project in London. Their client lived in one of the houses and, having bought the house next door, decided to appoint DOS Architects to create a design which merged both houses into a single family house. Caught between the borough’s strict Planning constraints and the client’s ambitious aim to create a bright, spacious and modern house, DOS chose to delimit themselves by retaining the overall structure of the existing house, whilst playing with the potential of a new rear garden extension. The new volume arose as a natural continuation of the house’s existing geometry, allowing the Architect... More

Our clients’ brief for this project was to add a modern ground floor extension to their Grade II listed Georgian terraced house in Duncan Terrace, Islington. More specifically, they wanted this extension to contain an extra bedroom, a kitchen and a living space which would act as a connection between the house and the garden whilst also respecting the existing Georgian Architecture. Our response, which obtained full conservation and planning approval, was to create a split volume that, on one hand wouldn’t compete with the existing Architecture and on the other offered a direct link to the house’s surrounding: The first and more solid volume takes the form of a wooden box which, like a piece of Japanese origami, envelops the bedroom and lit... More

The UAX company is engaged in the production and sale of casual clothing. Its headquarters are located on the premises of a former farm dating from the 1980s, and originally served as an administrative building. The client's wish was to extend the building and give it a new coat. The building's original layout was preserved. Only its main entrance was moved, which is now located in the new extension. The extension and the original structure are unified into a single whole with the help of façade made of wooden lamellas. The structural modifications were designed with a view to the building's surroundings; the extension respects the line of the street and the resulting structure creates an interesting contrast with the adjacent chapel. The... More