Roz Barr’s terrace home extension is a minimalist reimagining

London’s housing inventory is dominated by rank upon rank of purple Victorian terraces. These homes have a set movement and components; entrance bay, three or 4 bedrooms, reception rooms main down right into a kitchen and normally a modest backyard past. From the entrance, avenue after avenue seems to be just about similar. However as architect Roz Barr says, the story is extra difficult out again. Over the previous few a long time, house owners have labored on terrace home extension initiatives, constructing upwards and outwards and principally expanded their kitchens sidewards. These add-ons, stark fashionable packing containers plugged into their Victorian hosts, have established new architectural conventions. This can be a new hybrid kind, principally hidden from the skin world. 

The transformational energy of the terrace home extension

Barr, the architect behind the interiors of the Bureau co-working buildings at Design District on Greenwich Peninsula, the co-working and café areas at London’s Constructing Centre, Selfridges Artistic Studio and the Victoria Beckham studio in New York, has taken on simply such a Victorian terrace home revamp. 

The consumer had purchased the home, in Stoke Newington, north London, again within the Nineteen Nineties and has been renting it out ever since. Like many homes of that classic, it wasn’t in nice form, with bowed and battered flooring, straining drains and a crumbling bay. The consumer wished to return it to the rental market as a household home however in a a lot better fettle. 

‘It wanted one thing that was strong and contemporary however was in line with the age of the constructing,’ Barr says. Quite a lot of the work was restore and restoration, what Barr calls ‘cautious dentistry’. She cleaned up, saved the unique doorways and fireplaces, changed sash home windows and ironmongery with conventional radiators and put in reclaimed pine floorboards. ‘We wished it to really feel fairly settled,’ she says. 

Barr and the consumer determined to not construct upward however they did, in what’s now a sort of vernacular transfer, lengthen the kitchen into the backyard’s facet return. That is the place, in most renovation initiatives, the joins present. And never in a great way. ‘You stroll into these Victorian homes and it is fairly good and linear after which “pow“,’ says Barr, ‘there’s a large, high-tech, spaceship kitchen and loopy skylights and an enormous island within the center. It’s effective, I assume. It is what most of London has accomplished.’

Barr wished to be sure that transition from the Victorian to the modern was rather less jarring. The kitchen ground on this challenge is concrete screed with unglazed black and white quarry tiles, whereas gray Valchromat kitchen cupboard doorways emphasise the dusty understatement. Barr has added color – and she or he is an professional colourist – with inexperienced sliding Schüco doorways and purple concrete counters and splashback, however the impact is easy and managed. The outside of the kitchen extension is completed with glazed, creamy white brick, ‘respecting that Victorian language of the constructing’, says Barr.

It’s laborious to inform simply how a lot side-extension-grab sq. footage has been added to London’s housing over the past decade. With this challenge, although, Barr provides a mannequin for doing it with respect and restraint. 

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