Kempson Road

When the clients (private family homeowners) moved into this 6-bed end-of-terrace house in October 2011, it had been virtually uninhabited for a number of years and hadn't been modernised since the early 1980s.

To improve the arrangement of the living spaces on the upper and lower ground floors, and create a better connection between the house and the garden, a modernist glass cube has been created to link the kitchen to the dining and living areas.

The south-west facing glass extension extends down to a large family/games room on the lower ground floor and is linked to the garden by a sleek steel balcony with an open tread staircase. There are aluminium framed sliding glass doors on two sides and a glazed roof. Minimal framing to the glazed elements allows maximum light into the house and optimum views out to the garden.

The extension involved a complex piece of structural engineering because the rooms that were being connected were on several different levels. Major structural walls, supporting three storeys above, were also removed and replaced with an intricate network of steel beams and stub columns. This extension has added just 135 square feet in total to the house, but it has dramatically transformed the sense of space, and the connection between internal and external spaces.