Fab 40: Cassion Castle, London
Cassion Castle is turning the architectural hinterland of London's East End to his own advantage, seeking out unpromising plots and upgrading them into light-filled living spaces.
Together with former partner Carl Turner, he built the Twofold House, a home and studio for a pair of artists, and today he is hard at work on the Brick Studio, an artfully composed tower of brick designed for an industrial designer client in an off-the-radar London mews.
Castle also acts as contractor on many of his projects, a hands-on process that, he admits, tends to 'throw a lot of emphasis on our relationship with the client.' However, it also allows for far better quality. 'It gives me much better control over things, it's a more craftsman-like and experimental approach.'
Materials and finishes are always a focus: a refurbished Victorian mansion for a contemporary comic actor mixed spatial invention with elaborate touches, while a new low-energy country house in Suffolk is in the design stage.
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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).
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