Hyde Park Apartment
The client is a collector who entertains, and both of those things shaped the plan before anything else did.
- Size
- 1,800 sq ft
- Scope
- Full strip out and reconfiguration · Structural alterations · Replacement windows · Rear extension · Garden
- Photographer
- Nick Smith
An 1,800 sq ft apartment on the lower ground floor of a Grade II listed early Victorian terrace near Hyde Park, untouched since the 1980s. It came to us as a series of small, divided rooms. Stripped back, it was replanned as a single living and kitchen floor, and every window was replaced with joinery appropriate to the period.
The garden was the other half of the project. Roughly sixty per cent of it was a bank of shrubs, too steep to use. Most of the slope was cut away and retained, and the ground it released became a terrace with room for a firepit, a long bench and enough seating for a table of people. The garden is no larger than when we found it. It is simply usable now, and sound runs through it as it does through the rooms inside.
The materials are rich but deliberately recessive: a green quartzite dining table, limewash plaster in the bathrooms, stained oak joinery throughout.
