Draper Studio has completed a new architect's house - a spectacular double-storey extension to a Victorian home in south London that maximises the drama within its classic terraced template, common around the capital. Designed for founder Adam Draper’s own family, the house had already been extended, setting a precedent for more involved and extensive works once the household had got used to the space and explored how best to make it work for many years to come.
The new kitchen, with its experimental concrete floor and limestone block walls
Explore this south London architect’s house
‘[Because we’d been] living in the house a few years prior, knowing the location was great for schools and wanting a space for the next ten years, we discussed removing the existing lacklustre rear extension and maximising the home’s potential space at ground and first [floor levels],’ says Draper. ‘Although we got planning for a double-storey front extension, we worked out what was needed most: a full-width ground-floor rear extension to unify the three key spaces of a centrally accessed house, and a new double bedroom above.’
The new kitchen creates a much stronger connection to the garden
The major manoeuvre is a common one – taking out the rear façade and replacing it with a glazed, full-width extension for a garden-facing kitchen and family room. It’s a familiar device, especially with London houses, but Draper and his team have excelled themselves with the detail and materiality, stretching the budget wherever possible, from using spare stone bricks from other projects (‘kindly donated by my clients for use here’) to the most efficient brickwork patterns possible.
The timber frame is exposed throughout
‘Recycling a repurposed material became a comforting theme during these radical changes to our home,’ says Draper. Some of the concrete foundations from the old extension structure were used as gabion walls in the rear garden, for example. The roof cladding is raw zinc, designed to patinate, while the glazing is low-key and unobtrusive anodised aluminium, and inside the walls are finished in limestone blockwork.
Detail of the limestone blockwork in the new kitchen
‘Although the CO2 saving is relevant, using [the limestone] as a textural finish that glows in the daylight from the skylight above is the true value here,’ says Draper. ‘The ground-level concrete floor was a bit of an experiment,’ he adds. ‘We cast terracotta tiles, stones, shells the kids had collected on holidays past – although I was correctly stopped from putting Lego in as a retaliation for all the times I’ve stepped on it. The floor’s finish has texture – it is deliberately not perfect, and warm underfoot.’
The rear extension connects directly to the rest of the house
The primary material is the Redwood-pine timber frame, which is left visible throughout. ‘It’s everything in the space: a warm-feeling enclosure that feels linked to the main house in the winter and a pergola-like structure extending the garden when the sliding doors are cast open in the summer,’ says Draper. ‘With careful placement of rooflights, you’d hardly know there’s a double bedroom above with all the daylight flooding in.’
The new extension spans the width of the house
Much of the work was fabricated off-site to minimise disruption (and allow the family to stay put and save costs during the build). ‘Using materials that are real as opposed to finishes is also important, whether that be the concrete floor, the limestone blocks of the kitchen extension flank wall or the unpainted hemp plaster of the dining room,’ says Draper.
Using off-the-shelf lengths of timber also dictated the scale and rhythm of the frame, which in turn zones the 34 sq m extension into its different areas: kitchen, dining space and playroom.
Detail design in the new bathroom
As well as minimising off-cuts and sourcing second-hand materials where possible, the architects also salvaged elements like bathroom brassware, all in the name of lowering the environmental impact of the build. ‘It’s good to confront waste first hand,’ Draper admits. ‘Can stuff be repurposed, reused or retained, not just as an echo or a statement feature?’
A new bedroom sits above the kitchen
The new house succeeds as both a laboratory of ideas and techniques and as a warm, inviting family home. ‘It’s a privilege to design your own home and explore ideas that I’ve been unable, to date, to convince clients to go with,’ says Draper. ‘It’s a little bit of material experiment, a narrative of what a home can be, all unified in a large, warm volume that finally links the house and enables the spaces to cohere.’
