Two typical 1940’s semis in a north London suburb have been
restructured to create a 7,500 sqft house for
an extended family of eleven people. The practice of combining dwellings in
this fashion is commonplace in some communities in the UK, although largely on
an ad hoc basis and seldom from an architectural standpoint. The house is
shared by two brothers, their young families and their grandparents.
Jonathan Woolf architects has been
interested for some time in the way that UK construction methods rely on
materials that are becoming thinner and thinner whilst at the same time
striving to retain their surface material qualities. At the same time they have
been studying paint as a material in and of itself. This is not a new
phenomenon. The Georgians used paint meticulously to define a range of
atmospheres that united several different materials within an ‘over-all’ (or
‘all over’) finish. The 1940’s semi is the perfect foil for these
pre-occupations.
In this house almost all of the interior surfaces, walls, ceiling,
floors and joinery are either painted or laminated to match paint. This lends
the conventional shaped volumes an abstract character. The exterior of the old
building has been over-clad with insulation, the rear and side finished with a
layer of render, and the façade is faced with brick slips, presenting a clearly defined face towards
the street, a look which is emphasised by the original window openings, which
are retained to maintain the ordinary everyday feel of the traditional suburban
semi. Along the sides and to the rear of the building, however, the openings
become more expansive. The new building works within the footprint of the
existing properties, both of which had been extended previously on one level at
the rear and sides of the plot. The new project extrudes these up to two floors
together with an inhabited loft within a new roof shell. A steel frame has been
inserted at ground level to achieve generous proportioned social spaces on the
ground floor, which are of a scale in keeping with the size of this extended
family unit, and include recreation and study spaces for the children, a large
kitchen, eating and living area with large sliding windows opening onto the
rear garden. The ground floor also houses accommodation for the grandparents in
a position that reflects their place at the heart of the family unit.
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