The clients arrived with a simple brief for a ‘box-on-the-back’ to their modest post-war brick house. And more or less this is we delivered–a square plan single storey 7x7m flat roof addition containing a kitchen, dining room and study.
We contrived to complicate things ever so slightly through an oblique axis which bisects this simple‘box’:An angled living room wall extends through to define the edge of the kitchen bench and finally to delimit the patio. This strategy added a dimension of possibility to our floor plan,by allowing the adjustment of the angle to suit the program. Further complexity inevitably arises when the daily rituals and requirements of the family are unveiled through ongoing conversations about design and living. And so,the customs of cooking and entertaining, or where you might read to a child, or how a home office might connect to a living room were at the heart of the architecture. Simple but specific ideas emerged through these discussions; a space devoted to making coffee, an in-built seating nook, a hinged door that could fold into a wall,and an internal window between rooms. Each element re-worked with its own fine-grained logic and formal precision proving ‘God is in the details’
