Kitty's Coloured House, Bringing a joyful background to family life
This four-bedroom Victorian family home in Stoke Newington has been sensitively expanded with a bespoke Rear Ground, Roofs and Underground extensions.
As so often happens with growing families, the client needed to extend their existing home to create more space and take the opportunity to refurbish throughout the whole house.
The once rigid arrangement of rooms has been opened up, improving direct views and connectivity with the outdoors.
The perfect balance of shared and private family spaces enables a multitude of activities to be carried out simultaneously without issues of interference.
The design has maximised the planning potential of the traditional house by adding 70 sqm across the new basement, the rear ground floor and the roofs , while still maintaining a harmonic dialogue between the modern additions and its historic character.
At the rear, distinctive Glulam features and black-framed windows provide the consistency of repeated elements, inside a rigorous but picturesque articulation of old and new volumes.
All the interior environments have been designed in close coordination with the architectural envelope, right from the outset.
This approach gives legibility of the interior from the outside and allows the economic and efficient exploitation of every corner of the house to accommodate the requirements of each member of the large family.
The interior design is generally frugal, favouring “practical” over “cosmetic”, “necessary” over “superfluous”, but the open-plan environments strongly express joyful moods through the strategic use of colours.
Colours run throughout the interior, complementing different moods for the various environments: a fresh green links to the garden, vibrant yellows and oranges stimulate joy and energy even on a grey day, the warmly deep reds warm up family gatherings.
Cool blues soothe introverted moments of withdrawal. Subtle harmonies of
greys and whites define bathrooms and bedrooms.
All the staggered levels of the house are connected by a top lit open-tread stairwell.
