This pair of townhouses occupies a constrained but prominent site at the intersection of three roads in North London. They sit alongside the ‘Parkland Walk’, a route following the disused elevated railway between Highgate and Finsbury Park. Replacing the single-storey coal offices once associated with the redundant railway, the site is further restricted by the requirement for a seven metre unconstructed distance to the adjacent London Overground railway cutting.
The project is a collaboration with the housing developer Solidspace who build all of their projects around a spatial arrangement of split-level, open plan rooms whereby the principal social functions of ‘living, dining, kitchen and homework’ can enjoy diagonal visual relationships across a double height void. This fundamental aspect of the client’s brief extends throughout the project, resulting in half level connections between floors made by a winding Douglas fir staircase and a staggered composition of windows across its façades.
As with any house, shifting patterns of activity will see interior spaces accommodating a number of flexible and overlapping uses, which will function in different ways as the family life cycles of their occupants evolve. To this end, the two entrances into each dwelling offer the potential for the dining space to become a workroom with street level access and the entire upper section of the house to operate autonomously from the rest to ensure that these homes remain accessible and inclusive.
This flexibility is not a modern construct and in fact much of the housing stock that occupies the surrounding belt of late Victorian and early Edwardian London is configured with a secondary half basement entrance. Originally intended for servicing purposes, these arrangements have since enabled houses to be used in numerous other ways, with a teenager or granny annex, a home office, or to become an entirely separate dwelling.
The houses draw further connections with this surrounding territory of Edwardian London in order to deal with their public corner location, which must address a busy road junction with robustness and decorum. With little land available for front gardens, precedent is sought in the area’s late Arts and Crafts influenced buildings, which contain a rich wealth of architectural invention that deals with this condition of proximity.
Mediating between the street and the domestic world of the interior is achieved through the use of deep entrance thresholds that layer appropriate degrees of privacy to the spaces within. Each house is given a conjoined double arch that both defines a street level doorway into the entrance hall and then rises above a stoop that enters into the primary living room elevated above the pavement.
Rhyming with the massive brick arches of the former railway bridge opposite, the building face with its integral defensible space is confidant in pushing out to the limit of the site boundary, which serves to compress the road junction and create a more firmly framed and urbane public realm.
