A Villa in Hampstead

An absolute dream house. This is one of the few surviving Georgian villas on the road from London to Hampstead. When it was built, it was essentially a rural retreat, so it has this wonderful miniature country-house feeling. Although it has had its fair share of interventions over the years, the proportions are all still there. We’ve been working on this house in a slow and incremental way over quite a few years. The first phase of the work was to fix up the basement, where a playroom and TV room were in a sad state. The second phase was to tackle the ground floor, including an entirely new kitchen to replace the inefficient 1980s one. The next phase, for which we’ve helped the clients receive planning permission and listed building consent, will be to reorganise and update the top two floors of bedrooms and bathrooms.

On the one hand, a house like this is easy to work with, since it is full of naturally beautiful spaces. But on the other hand, the challenge is to intervene with new elements without distracting from the architecture of the building. In the kitchen, for instance, rather than going to a third-party kitchen company, we chose to design our own joinery in great detail. That allowed the kitchen elements to be exactly tailored to the proportions of the room instead of pulled from a a kitchen company’s kit of standardised elements. I’m very happy that the kitchen manages to be incredibly hard working while still feeling like a suitably authentic centre for this old house. Elsewhere we really went for it with the paint colours. Strong blues, pinks and oranges bring a strong energy to the house that perfectly matches the busy young family who live there.