Waltham Forest

An extensive refurbishment to a Victorian house with ground floor and loft level extensions.

Our clients, David and Anson, desired closer connection to their sunny rear garden in East London and to move the central large existing ground floor bathroom without compromising any of the other existing rooms in the house. We proposed a radical reorganisation to relocate the bathroom to a new loft extension, extending at ground floor to link the kitchen and dining spaces and refurbishing the whole house in addition.

The corners of the building at ground floor were cut away and glazed to link the inside spaces with the terrace and garden beyond. Whilst our clients desired highly glazed spaces, they did not want to feel exposed and favoured colour and texture for the interior spaces. In response, we suggested a glazing system with smaller panes of glass to give a sense of enclosure whilst playing the huge amounts of southerly light off against a palette of rich, dark materials with lots of tonal depth.

Although open plan, a change of level and floor finish at ground floor distinguishes the kitchen, dining and living spaces from one another and a small seating area within the kitchen provides social interaction across the spaces. A part new, part retained timber structure was exposed across the new kitchen area to unify the mismatched existing ceilings in this part of the house and give volume to the low head height at the rear of the building.

Environmentally, we re-used and renewed in timber much of the ground floor structure whilst the existing bricks from the cut away areas of the building were re-used on site. To mitigate overheating, all new glazing to the rear included solar control glass and large timber solar shades over the southern glazing at ground floor. These open timber framed solar shades are intended to be planted with climbing plants to create cooler shaded areas over the rear terraces as well as mitigating overheating within the house.