Deptford lives - house design

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996 by Penny McGuire

In a historic London borough bordering the Thames an austere new house reasserts the spatial transparency and clarity of Modernism within a traditional nineteenth-century brick skin.

Deptford lies west of Greenwich on the River Thames. Once the cradle of the English Navy and Henry VIII's shipyard, and set with great mansions, `[its] glories ... are departed'.(1) A great deal of the area is now covered by council flats, but a scattering of fine old buildings remains, including the Church of St Paul in Deptford High Street, by Thomas Archer -- which Pevsner called `one of the most moving eighteenth-century churches of London: large, sombre, and virile'.(2) The High Street itself possesses the scale and animation of a village.

On a narrow cobbled alley leading off the High Street, in sight of St Paul on one hand and a very handsome Georgian terrace on the other, an austere new house adds another fragment of architectural interest. It was designed by Mark Guard Architects for clients who both belong to that rare species, the architectural amateur.

Like Seth Stein's house (p60), this has a central garden and incorporates parts of existing buildings; but the site is much smaller and instead of Stein's expansive horizontal emphasis, Guard has stressed the vertical as much as the horizontal, so that the scheme makes a squarer impression.

Originally the site had contained a car repair workshop, made up of a nineteenth-century coach house with garage space on either side under rudimentary roofing. This was taken off to create two brick-walled spaces, one for an entrance courtyard and the other for a severely architectural garden. The coach house provided the shell for a two-storey house. Here, existing windows looking west over the entrance court to neighbouring windows were removed for privacy's sake. The pitched roof was taken off and redesigned so that narrow skylights let in on either side trace the roofline and shed light into the interior. The whole of the east wall was replaced on both levels with double-glazed sliding glass doors. Mounted externally they can be slid out of the way and made invisible, so the interior flows outside without interruption. A small studio with a roof terrace was built opposite the house, on the other side of the garden.

Maintaining the existing scale and building within the traditional envelope, Guard has created a series of interconnecting rooms on two levels, barely defined by light-reflective planes, transparent walls and strategically placed gussets of glass admitting a narrow view or glances of light.

To take advantage of the views, of the church and more distantly of Greenwich, the living room and kitchen are on the first floor, on each side of a central staircase where transparency is given a vertical dimension by a glass seat over the stairs. These are luminous spaces and sparely furnished, the cool white planes of walls and floor decorated only by the shifting light. The kitchen, contained by a free-standing wall underneath one of the narrow rooflights, is as neatly detailed and narrow as a ship's galley. With light pouring down through the rooflight and deflected by the containing wall, the space itself seems, when seen from the shadier depths of a sofa, a means of illuminating the living room. Eventually, the upper level will be connected to the roof terrace by a narrow bridge spanning the garden between the tops of Betula planted in the grey gravel below.

The garden and terrace have been conceived as exterior rooms, the former related to the interiors of house and studio through the transparent walls. This is of course conventional Modernism, but because the embracing wall of the garden is high, it really does feel like a room. On the ground floor, a narrow path flanked by a strip of water traces the line of an axis from the entrance to a rear door and steps to the terrace. Free standing concrete panels define spaces within the garden and support steel beams bracing the old walls and supporting the sliding windows.

(1) Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England, London Volume Two, Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, p103, 1969.

(2) Ibid, p104.