143 Three Small Houses - Stephen Taylor Architects

143 Three Small Houses
STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
Terraced Houses, Chance Street, London
award RIBA Awards London 2007
status completed 2007
brief Redevelopment of a brownfield site for the
construction of three new terraced town houses as part
of a larger redevelopment including offices, flats and a
new gallery
client Redchurch Property
area 350 sqm
cost £510,000
STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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gallery
1 site plan
2 model
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STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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1 view of the brass screened
entrance porches
2 east facing elevation
2
STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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1 section
2 view along Chance Street
2 view from entrance porch
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3
STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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1 timber staircase
2 stair detail
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STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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1 rear courtyard
2 courtyard view
3 ground floor live/ work room
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STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
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1 view to the street from the third
floor kitchen
2 view to the balcony from the
dining space
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STEPHEN TAYLOR ARCHITECTS
This project for three houses occupies a small infill site in Bethnal
Green, a neighbourhood in London’s East End. Replacing a postwar
single-storey shed, these houses complete an urban block made up of
diverse building types and activities. The brief asked to bring residential
use to the site in line with the local authority’s policy for housing growth
and the borough’s intensification of brownfield urban sites.
This project for three houses of single-room depth is built on the site of
a former print factory constructed after the war. Seen as an instance of
urban repair, the project acknowledges and celebrates the “patchwork
city” to which it belongs, its brick facade supplying the missing piece in
the block of which it is a part. Cognizant of the eighteenth-century small
London house typology that once occupied the site and the level of urban
intensification that came with them, themes of compact city dwellings are
explored through the design of these houses. Flat-fronted and abutting
their adjacent neighbours, these dwellings lie firmly in support of the
“street” and continue to define its hard-edged, intimate character.
The 12 × 9 metre site with a single east-facing aspect to Chance Street
is divided into three plots, each occupied by a three-storey house.
Light and air are brought into the rear by a series of small courtyards
with white clay brick walls. The intimacy of these external spaces is
both animated and illuminated by the extensive glazed elevations
that open onto them. At ground level, a configuration of folding glazed
screens facilitates opening two sides of the courtyard to the interior
of the houses, while on the first floor the large bi-folding windows that
constitute one side of the bedroom open externally across the void of
the courtyard, consuming this space by its physical action. The open
nature of the elevations at the rear embraces the courtyards as wholly
private spaces, their character and material presence a contrast to the
dark brick “public” facade to the street, and the part they play within this
neighbourhood’s urban patchwork.
Like the generic London townhouses of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the configuration of these houses anticipates a shifting of
their occupants’ use over time; rooms are designed with a view to
hosting a range of activities across each level. Inverting the usual
tradition – since this typology offers no ground-level garden – the
dining room / kitchen is positioned on the top floor, being farthest from
the street and benefiting from the best light, bedrooms are on the first
floor, and the ground floor is considered flexibly for a variety of uses
that may include a small work room. Given the narrowness of the
street, domestic activities on the ground floor are distanced from the
pavement edge by large inset porches. These porches are secured by
perforated and folded yellow metal “curtains,” which allow the eastern
sunlight to penetrate, its effect an intentional counterpoint to their gritty
context.