Caroline Place / Amin Taha Architects + GROUPWORK

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Text description provided by the architects. Surrounded on three sides by eight and nine storey mansion blocks shielding it from the heavy traffic on Bayswater Road and tourism on Queensway, Caroline Place is a quiet enclave of late 1950’s terraces north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Built with a Modern Northern European sensibility of sharp brick lines and crisp mortar joints layered with softer timber detailing, their interior layouts remained firmly rooted in an earlier English Edwardian tradition. Retaining a desirous separation of served and servant areas of maids’ rooms, sculleries, coal houses with a working rear yard. Servnats occupying the ground level with owners set out above, across larger light filled rooms. In the immediate post war period Bayswater had however already begun to lose its luster to that class, so much so that within a decade of being built its new younger inhabitants found these social conventions to be out of step with their aspirations. Undertaking iconoclastic remodeling and clearing out of the interior sub-dividing walls and where possible the exterior, replacing these with what was felt appropriate at the time. Four decades on, the new occupiers, a family of five, retain the aspiration for open plan living with a desire for tactile material finishes and inevitably to different tastes.