5 Haydens Place, London W11 1LY
Description of the Project
This is the house I designed for my family to live in. Built between 1993-1995, it was one of five houses designed for a redundant backlands factory site accessed from a mews off Portobello Road. The houses were laid out around a central shared landscaped courtyard, with the rear wall of each house formed by the boundary of the site. This created an inverted version of the Modernist model of the city-in-the-park, with each house predominantly reliant upon the shared courtyard garden for their primary external space.
Our plot was laid out along part of the southern boundary, with an orientation more or less north-east to south-west. The plot was long and narrow – 6.5m at its widest and 25.5m long. The principal orientation was to the south-west along the short axis, overlooking a new modest courtyard garden.
As a result of the site’s constraints, the long narrow form – at two storeys only because of planning constraints with neighbours – had to be cut into and modulated to bring large amounts of light into the house, to enliven the interior, and to compensate for the restricted views out. At the same time, we wanted to create some private external space integrated with the semi-public courtyard – that is, to find a form that linked internal domestic space with both private and semi-public landscape.
The long section for the house created a completely hidden and private garden terrace at second floor, set within the curved roof that was linked visually with the landscaped courtyard, mediated by the first floor living space that overlooked the shared courtyard: from this living space, a descending sequence of spaces was created that comprised private external space, private internal space and semi-private external space. The voluminous first floor living space – at the heart of the house – therefore had a duality of orientation towards both private and semi-public external space.
Within the living space, the sky was also an important part/component/experience of the central space and dominated the view out to the east towards the enclosed second floor terrace.
To further emphasise this sequence, the curved roof was floated off the perimeter walls on two courses of continuous glass blocks, allowing a sense of the voluminous living space to flow into, and be linked with, the higher level private external terrace. The height of the terrace walls within the curved roof are set so that it is not possible to see into the terrace from the surrounding properties when people are sitting down.
The rest of the accommodation has a subsidiary relationship with this primary sequence. The bedrooms sit below the section of the roof that is lower and flat, and the kitchen and family room are located on the ground floor below the living space. Whilst the ground floor family room has direct access onto the courtyard garden, it is the first floor living space, with its duality of external space in two opposite directions, that provides the experientially essential fundamental link between dwelling and nature.
The open staircase up to the first floor living space is adjacent to the entrance to the house and draws the visitor up to the first floor. Here, the first floor bedrooms act as a closed ‘private’ wing on one level, whereas the social spaces rise vertically integrated through three levels.
