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Architects: Urban Projects Bureau
- Area: 350 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Kilian O'Sullivan
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Manufacturers: Secco Sistemi, Arflex, Chesneys, Lazenby, Living Divani, Viabizzuno
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Lead Architects: Yonatan Buchhandler, Alex Warnock-Smith
Text description provided by the architects. This project transformed a Victorian terrace house in East London into a four-story family home that reflects the clients' South Asian heritage. At its center is a three-story gallery inspired by Islamic courtyard houses, organizing the kitchen, living room, and study. The kitchen acts as a courtyard, connecting living spaces via staircases and a bridge, while large landscape steps lead to a new basement family room. The design emphasizes detail, color, and texture for a cohesive interior, with views connecting the front and rear gardens, integrating outdoor elements including a winter garden to enhance the home's flow.
Improving well-being and liveability within the spaces of this traditional terrace house was central to the brief for a large family with diverse living and accessibility requirements. This was achieved by opening spaces up, creating large unobstructed floor planes, allowing clear visual connections between spaces and levels, and connecting spaces with specially designed slow staircases and a bridge. The project also includes the construction of a new treatment room in the rear garden.
Inspired by the traditional Islamic courtyard house, the new kitchen is conceived as a courtyard at the center of the house and is linked to different living spaces by new staircases and a bridge, giving a sense of community and intimacy to a domestic space. From the kitchen island, you can see into all the other living spaces and out to the front and rear gardens. Large landscape steps lead down from the kitchen to a new basement family room encouraging family interaction.
Connections with external landscape spaces, plants, and natural life are another important feature of the design, as well as ensuring good quality natural ventilation. Views are created through the depth of the house, linking newly landscaped front and rear gardens, and allowing light and air to pass through spaces and between the levels through natural cross ventilation. Natural stack ventilation is enabled from basement to roof through the new staircase and stepped section.
An internal winter garden in the dining room creates a resting place and transition between interior and exterior, garden and house. A clay-plaster wall lines the winter garden and provides a natural bio-based breathable wall that will change in tone in response to plants, temperature, and humidity. The rear extension is lined with a green roof.
