Oakwood

• Client: Sarah Glienke
• Location: Oakwood
• Completed: October 2018
• Contractor: TAOC Ltd. Art Maziarz
• Budget: £75K
• Team: Michel Schranz, Franziska Willers
• Photography: Nick Guttridge

We were briefed to design a 45m2 extension to this 1950 built detached house in the North London Area of Oakwood. Part of an existing garage to the side of the house was incorporated into the new extension that comprises of a new family kitchen, an extra guest room and a shower and toilet all at ground floor level.

The garden is south facing but we wanted to open the kitchen room west, onto the terrace in order to retain a clearer sequence of spaces: the original rear and front reception, with the new family room and kitchen two steps down and set in front of the formerly rear reception room. This also enabled us to contain the family room better and to stop the spaces ‘pouring’ down into the garden from inside out. The terrace with further steps down into the garden enforces this spatial sequence externally as well.

The kitchen balcony with its patio door straight into the kitchen wants to be a functional aspect integral to the kitchen itself: to grow herbs in pots, to cool off baking trays, to ventilate and of course to have quick access to the garden. This area is all clad in dark, phenolic plywood, including the fence behind, in part also to reduce the red-clad volume to the front and to visually reduce the overall appearance of the same volume to the south.

The cladding is a pressure treated white pine with a tomato red stain that works well against the duller, red bricks but also complements them. We found the house needed something fresh and smiling and the red did exactly that – though we were clearly and openly inspired by the South Bank Temporary Theatre Box that was clad in a similar red timber.

We are proud to have managed to build it for a relatively modest budget of £75K (excluding the kitchen furniture) and also to have made a family of four very happy.