Dulwich Village House, London
A mid-century house reconfigured and enlarged to provide a series of interconnected living spaces and a new pavilion style extension to the garden
Project Type:
A residential ground floor refurbishment and extension
Project Status:
In progress
This is an unusual layout for a three-bedroom house – a post war semi-detached property of two storeys with a hipped roof raking down to a single storey entrance hall and kitchen to the front elevation. As such, most of the rooms benefit from a rear garden view with a mature woodland backdrop beyond.
Our client’s brief was to investigate options to introduce an additional fourth bedroom into their home. The headroom available in the loft proved very limiting and so we investigated ways to reconfigure and extend the ground floor layout instead.
Proposed and existing floor plan
Proposed elevations
The resulting plan fully utilises the dramatic double height entrance hallway to interconnect new spaces at the ground floor. The kitchen is relocated from the front of the home into the centre, leading to a new dining room pavilion style extension that commands an outlook onto the rear garden. The existing integral garage is subsumed into the layout to provide a formal living room, whilst the existing kitchen area to the front is repurposed as a flexible room – either the fourth bedroom or for more general day-to-day use as a study or additional living room.
As well as being accessed from the main hallway, all rooms are interconnected with sliding walls, so that different levels of privacy can be achieved throughout the day.
The pavilion style extension extends upon our client’s material and colour preferences, with charred wood and racing green being firm favourites. Architecturally, a combination of interlocking elements are proposed that outwardly express these choices.
A brick terrace forms a ground continuation of the materiality of the existing home, whilst a new outdoor kitchen is neatly tucked between a brick buttress to the new extension. A ‘T’ shaped charred timber clad roof canopy props itself over the brick buttress, whilst a green rendered garden bay window feature interweaves itself around and under the roof canopy, to link back to the new living room within the existing home.
A composition of architectural elements
Illustrative view of the garden pavilion