The Works
Tucked within a quiet residential street in Twickenham, The Works transforms a modest former industrial building into a contemporary family home through a careful reworking of section, circulation and light. The project fundamentally reorganises the existing building around a continuous stair that generates four interconnected levels of living within a remarkably compact footprint.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Orleans Road formed part of a wider landscape of workshops and engineering yards, including the nearby Orleans Works, where some of Britain’s earliest motor cars were produced. Although No. 19 had long since been converted into a dwelling, successive alterations had gradually obscured much of its industrial character. Layers of paint concealed the original brickwork, the principal opening had been replaced with an unsympathetic entrance, and internally a series of disconnected levels and cramped staircases frustrated movement through the building.
The project began with a simple question: rather than asking how additional space could be added, could the existing volume be reorganised to create an entirely different way of inhabiting the building?
The answer emerged not through a plan, but through a stair.
From the earliest sketches, the staircase was conceived not as an isolated object but as the organising principle of the house. Rather than occupying the centre of the plan, it curls around the internal perimeter of the building, following the existing walls and generating a new sectional strategy that fundamentally redefines the interior. As the stair rises and descends, it connects a carefully choreographed sequence of spaces while allowing daylight, views and movement to unfold as a continuous architectural experience.
This approach transformed what had previously been two principal storeys and an awkward loft into four interconnected levels of living. Additional volume was carefully created both below and above the original structure. A new semi-basement was excavated beneath the generous ground-floor volume, while the loft floor was lowered beneath a new dormer, creating usable living space without altering the overall scale of the building. Within the interior, a subtle material ‘waterline’ quietly marks the point where the house transitions below ground.
The lower levels form the social heart of the home. Instead of excavating the basement to its maximum extent, the generous original ceiling height allowed the kitchen and dining area to be suspended as a raised platform overlooking the living space below. This creates a spatial relationship more reminiscent of a mezzanine than a conventional additional floor, preserving generosity of volume while allowing natural light to penetrate deep into the centre of the building.
Light became one of the project’s principal architectural materials. With no meaningful rear outlook and a high boundary wall enclosing the back of the site, daylight had to be borrowed, redirected and shared. A new dormer introduces light from above, while carefully positioned openings within the stair allow it to cascade through the section. Internal partitions of fluted glass and finely crafted timber screens filter rather than block light, enabling circulation spaces and adjacent rooms to borrow illumination from one another. Even the stair itself becomes part of this strategy, transforming what is often treated as residual circulation into a luminous sequence connecting every level.
Externally, the intervention is quieter but equally deliberate. Paint was painstakingly removed from the façade to reveal the original red brickwork detailing together with the darker engineering bricks that frame the large loading opening through which goods once entered the building. A surviving lifting beam continues to hint at the building’s industrial past. The poorly proportioned twentieth-century entrance was removed and replaced with a more permeable façade inspired by traditional warehouse doors. Automated external timber shutters reinterpret the visual solidity of the former industrial opening while allowing privacy, daylight and ventilation to be precisely controlled throughout the day.
The relationship between old and new is further reinforced through a deliberately restrained material palette. Rather than attempting to imitate the original fabric, every new intervention is conceived as a finely crafted timber insertion placed within the retained masonry shell. Ash defines the lighter structural framework, slatted screens and delicate vertical elements, while darker oak forms floors, wall linings and the principal planes of enclosure. Together they establish a quiet dialogue between structure and surface, allowing the new work to read as a coherent family of interventions while remaining clearly distinct from the historic envelope.
Working within a nineteenth-century building where almost no surface was square demanded watchmaker-like precision. Every stair, screen, lining and junction had to be individually calibrated to the irregular geometry of the existing structure. Rather than imposing a new order onto the building through layers of tolerance or oversized linings, the project embraces the inherited fabric, allowing the architecture to respond directly to its imperfections. The resulting craftsmanship owes as much to careful making as it does to careful drawing.
Although compact in scale, The Works is ultimately less concerned with creating additional floor area than with transforming the experience of inhabiting space. Circulation becomes the architecture. The stair becomes the plan. Light becomes the connective tissue between rooms. Together, these strategies reveal the latent potential of a modest former works building, demonstrating how careful sectional thinking can fundamentally reimagine an existing structure while allowing its industrial history to remain legible.
Rather than erasing the past, the project allows it to become the foundation for a new way of living — one in which history, craft and contemporary domestic life are woven together within a remarkably compact architectural framework.
