Highgate House
This new detached family house creates a strong relationship between its context, its external form and the composition of its internal spaces.
Shortlisted for RIBA London Awards 2017.
The architecture is given physical consistency and presence throughout by the sculptural use of brick as the predominant material. This provides coherence with the surrounding detached houses of the North London suburb, and although manifestly abstract in its use (covering all surfaces inside and out), the brick retains association of traditional craft embedded in the eclectic architecture of the neighbourhood.
A clear language of public and private realms is defined spatially and by the elevations of the house. The treatment of thresholds between interior and exterior space varies greatly in scale and proportion according to each room’s physical and visual connection to the street, the gardens and Highgate Wood beyond.
The large central hall becomes the defining element in the formal and spatial composition. It defines the centre piece of the radiating arrangement of brick masses which relate in scale and grain to the neighbouring houses and suburban condition. Simultaneously, the hall reinforces a hierarchy of rooms within the house according to patterns of living: open plan living spaces at the ground floor and more conventional cellular rooms on the upper levels.
