A Cork House

The client's needs have evolved through various stages; from being a young professional couple who enjoy entertaining, to aiding the expansion of Richard’s company with a garden studio, to adding a loft conversion for the couple's first child, while also acting as an experimental testbed for materials and form following the ethos of Richard’s studio, Richard John Andrews.

A Cork House is a three-stage overall development plan consisting of ground-floor extension and renovation, first-floor renovation and loft conversion, and garden renovation, which features another of Richard’s projects, The Light Shed. As owners and creatives established in the local area, which has struggled with its quality of housing for some time, Richard felt the house had to set a high standard for proceeding small-scale residential developments within the borough of Newham. The design set out to start a conversation about how high-quality building design shouldn’t be constrained by budget.

To achieve this, the bulk of the labour was undertaken by Richard's own hands without the aid of a contractor. Simple yet innovatively practical design solutions were adopted ranging from Indian ink-washed birch plywood kitchen cupboard doors to dyed concrete fireplace hearths poured in situ to pale birch plywood shelves offset ebony-stained original Victorian floorboards to a MD Façade Cork Board and London Yellow Stock Brick exterior.

Over the course of the project, it reaffirmed Richard's belief that within the field of architecture, the void between design and construction detailing can be bridged by a more practical and pioneering synthesis between designer and maker.

Annual CO2 data was not provided