Plain Pawson

Architectural Review, The, May, 2000 by John Pawson

HOUSE, LONDON

Within the original Victorian shell the stacked interior of a standard London house has been transformed by different geometries

John Pawson's house for himself and his family is in a leafy enclave of west London. The street face is a pleasant Victorian terrace looking east on to neighbouring terraces and gardens. On the west, the house gives on to a large communal garden, so that in front and at the back the outlook is of sky, trees and lawns.

As with his previous house Pawson has restored the shell but here he has completely gutted the interior so that nothing of the original remains. In replacing it, he has transformed the generic London terraced house, tempering the verticality of the standard plan -- with L-shaped stairwell and stacked up rooms -- by introducing strong horizontal emphases. On the lower floors, rooms run from front to back and flow into terraces, the linearity of the spaces reinforced by a long stone bench or kitchen counter stretching the length of the house and beyond into the garden courtyard.

If you consider the house plan in abstraction, you can see that the horizontal is held in tension with the vertical by means of a vertiginous chasm on the south side. It contains a narrow stone stairway that rises in a single flight from the ground floor to the top of the building. Within the same plane, a second flight descends to the basement.

More prosaically, reorganisation of the stairway opened up the plan of this long thin house, leaving a four metre wide band of unencumbered space on each floor. It was decided that the basement, giving access to private and communal gardens, should be extended at the back and made into a kitchen and dining room; the ground floor would then become a sitting room flowing out on to a rooftop terrace. The first floor, with views across gardens on both sides, was reserved for the main bedroom and bathroom and the top floor for the children.

In previous schemes (AR July 1996) Pawson has rendered stairways almost mystical places, ideally unadorned and illuminated by a single shaft of light. But this is his most extreme expression of passage yet. On entering you are confronted by the corrugated stone underside of the ascending flight, the inverse of the other flight descending in front of you. If the stairway is narrow, it is made to seem narrower still by steepness and height. From the foot of the tall ascending flight, which turns the corner at the top under a slot of light, you have the impression of a church tower.

Stone is the predominant material in this house. It is a material for which Pawson feels an affinity, which appeals to his austere sensibilities and satisfies an evident preoccupation with the elemental.

The preoccupation can be carried to eccentric lengths. In this building, huge limestone slabs pave all the floors both inside and out; stone has been used for the living room bench, for the children's worktop and for the immense length of kitchen counter which continues through a glass wall to become an external kitchen. Stairs are of stone blocks, and a monumental stone trough provides a bath big enough for eight people. In order to support the weight (and rectify subsidence) Pawson had first to underpin the building before constructing a concrete frame with massive floor slabs inside the shell.

To this adamantine simplicity are added the effects of light in this house. Daylight filtering through windows veiled in white mesh and through glass walls at the back works in combination with stone surfaces to produce honeyed luminance. Artificial light washing over white wails is concealed in peripheral slots around ceilings or behind stone fittings.

The absorption of the exterior into the design of this house is expressed in the detailing of external courtyards which become external rooms. At the top of the building, the glass roof of the children's shower can be opened at the touch of a switch for open-air ablutions or access to a rooftop terrace.

1 West back face of house with glazed ground floor wall and first floor terrace. Courtyard paved in limestone and extension of stone kitchen counter.

2 Stone stairs rising to top floor under slot of light.

3 North side of kitchen/dining room with Obumex kitchen by Pawson. Stone worktop lines wall and extends into back courtyard.

4 Living room with stone bench, fireplace and sofa/desk by Pawson.

5 Open-air shower between children's rooms. Electrically operated glass skylight leads to roof terrace.

6 Sitting room with fireplace and stone bench giving onto terrace.

7 Kitchen from front courtyard with cupboards lining south wall.

8 Master bedroom (left) and bathroom (right) with stone bath.

1. entrance

2. living room

3. terrace

4. kitchen

5. courtyard

6. void

7. bedroom

8. shower/lavatory

9. stone worktop

Architect

John Pawson

Project architects

Vishwa Kaushall, Enzostefano Manola, Simon Dance, Jonathan Bell, Alejandro Fernandez, Lorenza Marenco, Stephane Orsolini, Stephen Gilmore, Mansel Fletcher, Charlotte Williams, Andre Fu

Executive architect