Turner Architects

To extend the kitchen, we dropped the level for height and drew on Italian inspiration: Renaissance and Tuscan. The clients gave clues from their home and social media styling, and set a vision of shared meals on a Tuscan veranda. We drew on the Italianate style of the terraced house using classic, perfectly proportioned Romanesque arches for framed views through house and garden. The repeated form drew on Raphael’s School of Athens (Pillars of knowledge). The space between is set for conversation: a relaxed, light, gathering space and a table as the centrepiece of family and intellectual life for sharing food and ideas.

SW4: A Cloistered House

WINNER! Urban Oasis Prize, New London Architecture Don’t Move Improve 2021

Shortlisted, AJ Architecture Awards 2021, Under £500k

Longlisted, Dezeen Architecture Awards 2021, Residential Rebirth

The restoration and extension of a Cubitt-built Georgian terraced house in a conservation area. The house was carefully given life having been left to ruin for many years. It retains the formal room arrangement over three storeys, stacking studies, bedrooms and bathrooms. This creates a line of defence between the street and the new extension to the rear.

Referencing Dutch courtyard paintings, traditional East Asian courtyard houses and monastic cloisters, the extension has a formal courtyard arrangement with the intent of creating a protected and quiet space at the heart of a family home.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Image by https://www.rchivers.co.uk/

SE5: Colour Plane

SELECTED AS ONE OF LONDON'S BEST HOME EXTENSIONS #DMI 2020

We started with the paintings on the wall. The works are by John Prentice (the owner's grandfather), an artist and engineer. Prentice has written about colour selection turning it into a language akin to a musical score in his thesis Colour Plane. He uses this theory of colour to tell stories.

We wanted the house to imbue these theories.

His paintings of natural and urban landscapes fill the walls of the house with their strong painterly brush strokes and rhythmic colour selection.

Our response is to use an eclectic but carefully chosen palette of materials and colours to give the house this painterly and textured quality. A main component of the design is a concrete and timber tree which rises from the garden. This tree branches across the back of a new kitchen hosting seats and a swing, framing views and collecting domestic spaces. Light mottles as it falls through these branches.The maker's mark (like the painter's) are left clear with finishes reflecting their engineered raw state: a soft impression of the built and natural. This is layered with strong colours lifted from the paintings and placed next to one another to help give backdrop to the home’s new stories.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Turning to face the garden

The house fronts a busy arterial road in West London. The route to the train station is through the long garden at the back of the house. We have initiated a shift and reorientation of the house to face the back and formally address the garden. The walk through the garden should be seen as akin to a walk through the countryside - and its quilted fields.

This motif of a patchwork is taken through and into the house. Patterned and textured brickwork on the back wall was designed as the weavers loom as if creating a quilt (and a bouldering wall for the children!). As you enter the home, patchworked materials are stitched together to frame activity. Stitches and patterns are expressed in touches across all the finishes. The large family room is divided into smaller spaces by subtle shifts in materials, more or less refined depending on function. The effect fans out like pleated fabric

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

The owners of this home are both film makers. They curate and make images to tell a story. Our response to the brief to create an enlarged kitchen was to make an extension that allows display of imagery and artwork in different mediums.

The back of the dining room is a cabinet of curiosities, the courtyard was designed for the display of a larger piece of art (as filled with balloons), the shelf on the long wall is for a changing exhibition of paintings, the extended wall is for the projection of film. The window to the garden is a picture in its own right, the frame mimicking the framing of the art.

Microcement on the walls and floor is a simple palette to draw your eye to the art but befits a home; durable and warm. This continued palette gives the space a sculptural quality particularly as dappled light and shadows are cast across the space – a marked change from the dark and confined space that was there before.

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A growing family needed a larger kitchen and wanted a family room that opened up the garden - there was, however, a large tree which sat directly next to the existing kitchen.

It was loved by the family, they have enjoyed sitting under it in the summer, watching the seasons change against it but it was threateningly close to the house and blocking the light and views out.

Our response has been to create an extension which has been inspired by the feeling of sitting under a tree. Glimpsing the sky in different directions and with changing light as though looking up through its branches. The form of the roof, also allowed light to get to the back of the room.

Our brief was to create a space with a series of overlapping functions: a kitchen, a dining room, a snug for watching a flickering light (either fire or tv) and a garden room. To keep this open yet clearly demarked we used stepped levels between the spaces, and a shift in finishes.

The kitchen is elevated with a timber floor continuing the floor finish in the main house. The floor then steps down to the dining room and still further to the snug. The snug and the dining room are limestone finish which runs through to the garden. This emphasises the cutting into the solid ground with the tree growing above.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

http://www.turnerarchitects.co.uk/n5-peeling-back-the-layers

The house had previously been owned and lived in by a number of generations of the same family over more than half a century; it had become a repository for changing taste. As family members grew up and fashions changed, new decorative linings were laid over the old. As electricity was introduced, it was set in trunking fixed proud on the wall and wall papered over. Cohabiting happily were Victorian cornicing, 50's carpet, 60s bathroom finishes, 70s kitchen, 80s transformer wallpaper (the list goes on) we counted over thirty different patterns.It was colourful but also warm and familial and carried on every wall a reminder of what once went on inside.

The existing became the inspiration for the new. Our take on a new wallpaper was a lining of oak panelling. It was used as a new material to represent a new family and use, but also indicate a function.

The oak panelling dropped down next to the courtyard to create a temporary study, the oak panels open up in the hallway to create coat/shoe storage, acting as a bench and shelving in the kitchen. Whilst giving the rooms function, we were also wanting to create a home that could adjust to changing family needs.

We wanted to create views of rooms through rooms where family life could co-exist, each generation of a family acting with free will in the company of others.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

A library, under a tree, at the end of the garden.

The brief was for a study, spare room and storage for a growing family, where an extension to their flat was prohibitively complex. Planning required a metre hiatus from the boundary and so, to fit it all in, we looked to the heavens to create a space that gave them all they wanted: led by thought, and elevated by a heavy weight of books above, and the lightness of the open air above that. 

The design celebrates and values its foundations by using the permanence of concrete to create a sense of solidity that also performs very modern functions: a place for the brightly coloured plastic a young family collects. Using the metre set back, the raised planters provide void low-level storage, firmly grounded.

The roof is constructed from the cast of the foundations – the sheets of wood shuttering that created the cast for the concrete have been used to create the ceiling's beams. It forms a deliberate heavy block above you rather than hiding from the site’s constraints. The heaviness is the weight of learning and respect for the canon – but in looking up, the books themselves create colour and warmth, then up again the tunnelled light is uplifting.

In between, the garden and its more urban surrounds are welcome context seen through the deliberately simple, lightweight structure - creating a warm and friendly feel for a quintessentially family addition.

Throughout, the aesthetic has come from the making, with no effort to hide the simplicity of the materials: concrete, ply. There are day joints in the concrete showing the different pours, shuttering marks from the form work, simple valve taps and roll marks in the steels.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Shortlisted for the best new home improvement project in London! #DMI2017

This was an interesting brief.

Our client wanted to have a separate living room and kitchen, but also wanted to open up the downstairs space for when the wider family got together.

This small, locally listed cottage didn't have a lot of space. 

We designed and built a moveable piece of furniture, which sits in the middle of the ground floor, and can be moved to one side when the family wants to use the open-plan space.

It has an oven and fridge on one side. The other sides are a study, bookshelves and cupboards.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

This was a typical, quite rundown Victorian house in a conservation area.

We remodelled and extended the house, and kept a lot of the original, handmade features or used them as inspiration for what we added. 

Tiles, floorboards and metal railings were given a modern twist.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

This is a large, Victorian house on the end of a terrace. It was draughty in winter and too hot in the summer. We completely refurbished the house, and created light, open spaces. 

We retained some of the original Victorian design intent by keeping the kitchen and utility room (the 'services') separate from other rooms (the 'served'). And elsewhere, we didn't knock through lots of walls to create a big open-plan space. Instead, we kept different rooms and spaces for different uses.

We made more room in the loft by changing the shape of the roof, and turned two small rooms into a large master suite, dressing room and bathroom.

We reconfigured the ground floor and extended it into the garden.

We made the kitchen bigger and placed it at the heart of the home. 

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"Here is true architectural purity… nothing but yellow London brick and unselfconscious self respect... Roupell Street, answers with a wavy parapet...On one level there is no finer architectural effect in London."
Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Book of London. 

We have created a number of light-weight glazed additions to this street of Grade 2 Listed properties. Carefully respecting the existing historic fabric (early Georgian) the new additions link otherwise fragmented plans, creating outside rooms and opening kitchens up to underused and poorly accessed gardens. These projects are good examples of 'quiet' architecture where a series of small interventions ensure that the character of the existing houses are celebrated whilst also updating them to reflect the modern requirements of the current occupants. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com/Turner Architects

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

This was a two-storey rear extension and interior refit to create a beautiful and homely space. 

We spent a lot of time looking at how the family would use different parts of the house.

We designed for clarity and calm, and to enhance the natural flow of the home.

For example, we built recessed curtains, which are hidden when they are pulled aside. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

We modernised this family home with thought for how the space might be used in the future. 

We created a better connection from the house to the garden.

We also built into the design the possibility of turning downstairs into a self-contained garden flat. The owners had recently retired, and were thinking about what they would need if they became less mobile as they got older.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

We have worked on over 50 loft conversions. Each one has opened up new possibilities for our clients' homes. 

Here, the family had a beautiful dining table, which they asked us to make space for in the kitchen, along with storage and seating. 

We had to do a 'creative rethink' when we found a chimney stub in the kitchen, which was impossible to remove. We used joinery to envelope the table. And in the process, hid the stub. 

We hid a cat flap behind the seating, in order not to break the clean lines and bright entrance into the garden.

Upstairs, we replaced traditional wooden spindles with copper piping on the balastrade, to continue the theme of reinterpreting the building's original style through different materials. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

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www.adamscottimages.com

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www.adamscottimages.com