This semi-detached house in the Putney Conservation Area had been divided into seven bedsits and allowed to fall into dereliction. Our project returns it to life as a generous family home, extending and completely refurbishing the building. Taken back to brick, the house was given a comprehensive thermal upgrade throughout: a warm new lining within the retained fabric, paired with a highly insulated timber-framed addition.
The client, interior designer Clare Gaskin, was also our close collaborator. The relationship grew from our successful work together at Balham Park, and here architecture and interiors were developed as one conversation. Layouts evolved closely with Clare and her family, producing a highly personalised home shaped around how they live—and how they wanted to express themselves through it.
The ground floor unfolds in three parts. At the front is a cosy, luscious snug wrapped in chocolate brown; at the rear, a large, airy kitchen and dining room extends towards the garden, with a generous new window framing the meadow beyond. Between them sits an enviable sequence of practical yet playful spaces dedicated to cocktail making, flower arranging and the vital business of storage.
Much of the first floor is given over to an extensive primary suite. Here, as elsewhere, Clare’s commitment to reuse and the avoidance of waste gives the interiors particular character. Wallpaper left over from an exhibition finds a permanent home, while bathroom cupboards faced in recycled glossy red Perspex create intense colour and remarkable shifting reflections.
The top of the house belongs to the children: a bedroom, bathroom, homework room and laundry—providing useful opportunities to earn pocket money. During construction, further space was ‘found’, allowing a previously inaccessible loft to become a playroom den. Its raised sleeping platform doubles as a relaxed home cinema.
The rear elevation forms the architectural centrepiece. Facing south and west, it required careful solar control. Patinated copper cowls project around the existing upper windows and the extension’s large triple-glazed opening, shading both high overhead sun and strong afternoon light as it tracks round the house. Through extremes of summer weather, these distinctive frames have proved highly effective in managing internal temperatures. The additions are clad in joinery-grade, thermally modified ash: a precise hardwood rainscreen weathering gradually from rich brown to silver.
The garden is conceived as a meadow, with mown paths threading through long grasses to small clearings: one for sitting, another just large enough to wheel out a table-tennis table. A seed sown in our early conversations, this idea has been beautifully realised by young garden designer Stuart Spice. The meadow continues over the extension roofs, billowing up towards the first-floor windows and drawing garden and house together as a softer, more generous form of architecture.
