Park View

The brief to enlarge a top floor flat for two doctors and their children asked for a large dormer on the pitched roof and a first floor extension over an existing flat roof.

Rather than backing onto the gardens of another row of houses the plot backs onto Holly Grove Shrubbery near Peckham Rye Station. The shrubbery is a long, narrow park enclosed by metal railings lining one side of a street of semi-detached villas that back up against adjacent railways arches.

This unusual context offered an opportunity to reorient the building towards the park and introduce a civic quality to this ambiguous urban landscape. The dormer and the balcony, features commonly added to Victorian houses, are made deliberately architectural, open and outward looking.

The design aims to find a balance between the pleasur
n ordinariness and everyday things and a sincere enquiry into the nature of architectural form, typology and expression. The materials specified are commonly available, low cost and simple to work.

The dormer window and the balcony share a basic architectural language of vertical and horizontal elements. The dormer is the cruder of the two elements alluding to archaic buildings in the landscape. The balcony is more refined recalling the loggia of an urban villa and overlooking the park to give the building a public face and a connection to the city.