A 1990s face-brick house in Bryanston with a good garden and no way of reaching it. The living rooms sat a metre above the lawn behind a run of small windows, and every route out of the house went the long way round through the kitchen.
The brief was to open the back of the house and add the room the family had been doing without. What that turned into is a two-storey volume across the rear elevation — living space below, opening level with the garden, and two bedrooms over it.
Reading the house first
The existing house was not the problem. It was well built, and the parts of it that worked — the entrance, the stair, the north-facing bedrooms — were left alone. The survey took a week and settled what could carry load and what could not, which is what decided where the new volume goes.
It sits where the old rear wall was, so the extension inherits the house's own geometry instead of being pushed out at an angle to catch a view. The floor level steps down once, inside, and lands flush with the terrace — the single move that does most of the work.
Three things it had to do
The extension does three jobs at once, and the detailing had to hold all three without the house reading as two buildings stitched together:
- get the living space down to garden level and keep it warm
- add two bedrooms and a bathroom without a new stair
- leave the front elevation exactly as the street knows it
The third is the one that constrains the other two. Everything added is behind the ridge line, so from the road nothing has happened.
