Studio Bark has transformed a Victorian villa into an eco-friendly family home

Retrofit continues to be one of the most vital areas of innovation in domestic architecture, especially in locations where space for new build is at a premium and great swathes of fundamentally solid and eminently adaptable housing stock is ready for conversion. That’s the thinking behind this new house, a transformed Victorian villa in Tunbridge Wells, recently extended and radically overhauled by East London practice Studio Bark.

Tour this radically transformed Victorian villa

The firm, which won the Architecture Activism Award 2024 has a long history of adapting and enhancing the energy performance of traditional homes. This detached double-fronted Victorian villa was an excellent blank slate. Essentially untouched for half a century, it had none of the half-hearted fixes and sticking plaster solutions applied over the decades. Studio Bark was able to extend and upgrade the house, adding an extra bedroom and a linear addition at the rear, while reducing the overall energy consumption of the site.

The project was undertaken using the studio’s U-Build system, a modular construction method that allowed the 50m2 rear extension to be undertaken as a self-build project by the clients. Timber-clad and thickly insulated, the extension has two bedrooms on the first floor and a full-width kitchen diner on the ground floor that connects with the existing living space and a new pantry. There’s also a new side entrance, which replaces a lean-to garage.

With the side elevations clad in cork over wool insulation, and the addition of the new extension, the house’s thermal performance has been massively improved. New double-glazed sash windows on the front elevation retain the house’s traditional look, giving no clue as to what lies behind.

This blend of upgrade and heritage restoration carries through the entire house, with a warm colour palette that accentuates the original Victorian detailing, especially the joinery, architraves and plasterwork, paired with a stripped-down contemporary timber aesthetic for the new kitchen, made from exposed spruce plywood. This cladding material is also used in the U-Build extension to differentiate it from the main house, complete with steps leading off the half-landing to reach it.

This is not a precious house, with an esoteric mix of colour, heirloom and salvaged furniture. The transformation included the creation of a triple-height atrium in the heart of the house, reusing the existing stairwell to illuminate the landings and hallway thanks to a new skylight. Energy efficient systems included the addition of an air source heat pump and MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery), taking energy bills down by 75% despite increasing the floorspace by 27%.

Founded by Wilf Meynell, Nick Newman and Steph Chadwick, Studio Bark is pushing its U-Build system as a relatively straightforward way of creating a modular extension, using timber elements that simplify the construction process and can even be de-mounted and reused.