Vestry

Project description

The site is the rear garden of a house on the junction of Vestry Road and East Avenue, in the middle of the magical Walthamstow Village, with a garage and a second outbuilding on it, a run of hard decking, and a worn rendered boundary wall. It backs onto the service yard and vehicle access that serves the commercial units on Orford Road, and next door is the Sakina Trust, which occupies the late Victorian building that was once the GPO sorting office.

The proposal clears the garage, the outbuilding and the decking, and puts a two storey, two bedroom house of 155m² on the footprint for a couple, arranged around a courtyard and an entrance courtyard. The entrance hall, a guest bathroom and a studio bedroom sit at ground level, and the living room, kitchen and main bedroom are upstairs where the light is.

Stand alone new build sites in Walthamstow are rare, and this one is a pleasure to be working on, a mile or so from Catching Sun House, another Studioshaw building in a part of London we know well and love.

The thinking is an evolution of that project rather than a repeat of it, carrying over the same interest in getting everything a tight site will give in terms of light, views and sunlight at the right times of year, but with less concrete and a more sustainable set of materials. The plot takes uninterrupted north light off the flat court behind it and good southern light as well because the buildings around it are low, and the plan, the openings and the rooflights are set out to catch both.

Backland development in a conservation area is dependant on two things, height and building line. Officers supported the principle at pre-application and confirmed the height reads as subservient to both the neighbouring houses and the Sakina Trust, but they asked for the building to step back from Vestry Road and for the roof to lose its variations. Both wings share one roof height, with a generous rooflight, and a continuous brick garden wall which runs across the existing house so the frontage reads as a single curtilage.

Vestry Road has no consistent material or typology, running from London stock to red brick, stucco and render, two to three storeys, early Victorian through to post war infill. Rather than copy one of them, the house is a single handmade textured brick across the whole facade, with anodised aluminium windows and mullions, brick coping and metal flashing beneath.

William Morris was born in Walthamstow and the gallery is a walk away, and two elements of the house pick that up. The entrance gate is a solid cast panel embossed with foliage, taking the relief of his hand carved printing blocks, and as it slides into its pocket in the wall the planting in the courtyard appears through the glazing behind. The first floor balustrade is the lighter version, a perforated screen set in front of a large sliding window and closer to the layering of the wallpapers.

The house is all electric and car free, heated by an air source heat pump sat on the lower rear roof and hidden from the street. Wildflower meadow roofs cover 50m² across both wings and permeable porous paving covers the courtyard and the entrance courtyard.