Snug House

Set on the edge of the Parkland Walk that connects Highgate Woods and Alexandra Park in North London, Snug House provides a new kitchen and dining space as well as a new front door and access to the garden. The site slopes steeply from front to back and the extension sits below street level in the gap between two grand Edwardian Houses that were sub-divided into four, oddly-organised homes decades before.

The extension allowed the space to be converted from a two-bedroomed flat to a three-bedroomed maisonette over four split-levels: bedrooms over the raised ground and first floors and living accommodation over the two lower ground floors. The extension has transformed a flat into a family home with a sense of separation between functions and with family-scaled social spaces that open up to the garden.

The scale and form of the extension was limited in order to preserve the neighbouring property’s rights to light however with this careful daylight analysis arose the opportunity for two raised volumes: one at the entrance which houses the stair to connect into the existing house and another at the rear that provides a pyramidal-shaped skylight over the dining table.

The roof profile along with the site’s irregular footprint help give the building its distinctive character both inside and out. Inside the house, the staircase was re-planned to allow the smoothest transition between a complex set of levels with treads that run into ledges and a worktop and a bulkhead that runs into shelves for plants.