London Fields House

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The house is in poor condition, unmodernised in decades and chopped into small dark rooms, with a lower ground floor that has almost no relationship to the garden behind it.

Our clients, a young family, were clear about what they wanted. One large, light-filled space at garden level. Natural materials, low-VOC finishes and an energy efficient house. Plenty of discrete storage to put things away, so the space stays calm and uncluttered and open.

One requirement cut across all of it. They needed a flexible room on the same floor for visiting family – a room that had to exist without breaking the openness of everything around it.

The house is extended to the rear and stripped back to its brick shell, so everything inside it is rebuilt. That does two things. It lets us rethink the plan from first principles — including reversing the stair, so that you now arrive at the bottom facing the garden rather than the street. And it lets us build back a properly efficient envelope: high levels of insulation, improved airtightness, and cold bridges designed out rather than patched over.

Our answer to the guest bedroom is a single wall of timber joinery running the full length of the lower ground floor plan, from the kitchen at the garden end to a flexible room at the street front. Folding partitions sit hidden inside it. Most of the time they stay there and the floor reads as one space; when they are drawn out, the street-front zone becomes a room. The same wall holds the storage that keeps the rest of it clear.

At the rear, the floor steps down two risers – giving the space extra height, opening it to the garden through full-width glazed doors, and quietly separating cooking from sitting without a wall.

Outside, the extension is framed in red sandstone, its warmth drawn from the yellow London stock brick it sits against. A planted roof helps it settle into the garden. Inside, timber and stone throughout.

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