Hampstead house by Canaway Fleming Architects features five courtyards and stark white walls
Canaway Fleming Architects has completed an "unashamedly modern" house in a north London conservation area, featuring rooms that frame a series of small courtyards (+ slideshow).
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The two-storey Courtyard House is located behind a 17th-century cottage in North End, Hampstead. But unlike its historic and traditional neighbour, the residence was designed as a series of simple white-rendered blocks.
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According to London-based Canaway Fleming, the intention was to create a building that is sensitive to its context, but that also offers a "calm, serene quality" to the residents – a couple with a young child.
It is the latest in a series of contemporary houses completed in the area – a notoriously difficult place to win planning permission – following a timber and stone building by Stanton Williams and a fabric-clad artist's house by Guard Tillman Pollock.
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"Any intervention on the site had to be handled extremely carefully to respect the existing historic structures and the sensitivity conservation area as a whole," explained architects Martin Canaway and Nick Fleming.
"The form and materials of the house are deliberately homogenous to provide a sculptural quality that responds to the changes in light during the day and seasons," they said.
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The plan was organised around a pair of mature trees, which allowed courtyards to be created at the south and east corners of the plot. Small terraces were then added at the two remaining corners, while a fifth courtyard was created within the volume of the house.
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Only one of the building's two storeys is located above ground. It contains a living and dining space and a separate kitchen, both of which open out to different courtyards. There is also a small study that faces a courtyard on one side and a staircase on the other.
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All rooms on this floor features simple furnishings, with white surfaces and cupboards, and pale wooden flooring. Colour is introduced infrequently, with examples including an artwork hanging in the kitchen.
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The larger basement storey wraps around the sunken internal courtyard, allowing plenty of light to filter into a master bedroom suite. Three smaller bedrooms are also located on this floor, illuminated by skylights overhead.
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"The basement rooms are made light and airy by the introduction of double and triple-height lightwells that provide natural ventilation and daylight, and essentially breathe life into the rooms," said the architects.
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"In addition these courtyard spaces are arranged to provide unexpected and long views, making the house feel extremely spacious despite being, in large, part subterranean."
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The architects specified a well-insulated reinforced-concrete structure, providing a comfortable environment inside the house and ensuring that residents won't hear or feel the movements of London Underground trains running nearby.
Photography is by James Brittain.
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