This residential project has been designed as a playful intervention in a Soho street. The site was previously occupied by a number of houses, all built on typically narrow Soho plots, which did not cohere into an effective streetscape. This scheme uses a series of brick party walls to suggest a similar series of narrow plots but here ordered to create a new rhythm. A solid brick end wall, punctuated simply by horizontal slot windows, reinforces the building's terraced-street character.
Each plot contains three apartments, expressed in a palette of materials typical of this area of Soho. Part of each dwelling's façade is made up of traditional Soho glazed bricks that wrap around into the kitchen, linking the interior of each apartment to the facade. The pattern of the glazed tiles refers to the colours found in the Berwick St Market. A series of photographs taken of the market stalls are pixellated into squares of single colours. These squares are then stretched to the proportion of a tile and used to enrich the façade. The effect echoes the Victorian glazed tiles found on many London tube stations and public houses, and ties the new building into the history and culture of Berwick Street.
Projecting out of each glazed brick wall is a timber frame that contains a window and an opening timber shutter, introducing a further Soho game of concealment and exposure.
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