Lawn House

The brief for the conversion of this house in the Snaresbrook Conservation Area, centred around removing the cellular division of cooking, dining and living spaces on the ground floor and provide an unobstructed open-plan extension with a stepped relationship to a terrace and to the large rear garden. The designs provide intimate spaces that allow the family to be within a single room but able to engage in separate activities.

The design opens up and extends the rear of the house to provide differing levels of physical and visual permeability, openness and intimacy. Formally, the design mimics and reinterprets the pitched roof of the original building creating a unique form that belies the extension’s scale. Projecting canopies, cantilevered eaves and a staggered plan, enclose spaces that embrace the programmes and patterns of modern family life.

The spaces are enclosed under a series of pitched roofs. Three are centred on the original house giving a symmetry to the rear elevation, while the fourth and fifth pitches are elongated across the garage, covered yard and BBQ areas to shield the site from a neighbouring residential block. The building’s form and internal spaces are dissected by two dividing lines that cut across the plan. The first is a level change that steps down at the point of the kitchen island.

The second is an imposed line that draws from a point at the foot of the main stairs in the centre of the house diagonally across the new spaces towards the garden. These two lines are accentuated through a change of materials; half of the space being finished in wood and half in polished concrete. At the juxtaposition of the two lines sits the tricorne-shape, in-situ cast concrete kitchen island that defines the meeting of these spaces and materials.

A hand-polished concrete kitchen island forms a dramatic triangular form in the centre of the space encasing a range of functions and uses. This single, cast in-situ feature includes concrete steps, which fold seamlessly from the island up-stand and tail off into a cast concrete skirting board.

These concrete elements connect to internal and external polished concrete floors. The concrete surfaces all connect down one side of the house to appear as a seamless mass stepping and folding its way outside where it provides a raised terrace overlooking the garden.