Clissold Park House
A Victorian terrace near Clissold Park, Hackney, had grown dim, damp and disconnected over a century of piecemeal change. The brief was to put that right at the root rather than patch around it: a full retrofit, with a wraparound ground-floor extension and a new loft addition, built for a young family’s daily life rather than the house’s original one.
The house was taken back to little more than its original external walls and built again from within, with new structure and services throughout, including an air source heat pump. The result is left honest rather than concealed: the house reads as itself now, not as a copy of what it once was. Two extensions, a kitchen below and a bedroom floor above, carried it from 102 to 165 square metres without it ever reading as larger, only as resolved.
Inside, a single material palette of oak, marble and concrete runs through every room, binding the house into one open sequence in which no space outranks another. Pocket doors carry that same idea further: built to vanish fully into the walls, they let a room close for privacy or dissolve into the next without ever interrupting the run of floor and wall behind them. The kitchen asks more of the palette than anywhere else, but not by choice. Its garden-facing floor sits a level below the rest of the house, sunk to give the step-free opening onto the patio the height and privacy it needed, and the garden rises to meet it in gentle terraces rather than one flat lawn. It is the room where the family’s life now gathers, open on every side, yet it keeps to the same quiet restraint as the rest of the house. Oak joinery is built into the walls rather than standing apart from them, with beds, desks and vanities grown out of the fabric of the house, and switches and sockets recessed flush into the plaster so nothing breaks the run of a wall.
In the bathrooms, Carrara marble meets microcement underfoot, and basins and vanities are held clear of the floor, keeping the rooms light and uncluttered.
Date appointed — August 2023
Date commenced on site — June 2024
Practical completion date — November 2025
Credits
Architecture — Name Architects
Contractor — Builders Team
Structural Design — Devise Engineers
Joinery — E Squared
Glazing — Fluid Glass
Finishes — Lazenby, Hittoak, Carrara, Coalbrook
Photography — Lorenzo Zandri
Styling — Nina Lilli Holden
Clissold Park House
A Victorian terrace near Clissold Park, Hackney, had grown dim, damp and disconnected over a century of piecemeal change. The brief was to put that right at the root rather than patch around it: a full retrofit, with a wraparound ground-floor extension and a new loft addition, built for a young family’s daily life rather than the house’s original one.
The house was taken back to little more than its original external walls and built again from within, with new structure and services throughout, including an air source heat pump. The result is left honest rather than concealed: the house reads as itself now, not as a copy of what it once was. Two extensions, a kitchen below and a bedroom floor above, carried it from 102 to 165 square metres without it ever reading as larger, only as resolved.
Inside, a single material palette of oak, marble and concrete runs through every room, binding the house into one open sequence in which no space outranks another. Pocket doors carry that same idea further: built to vanish fully into the walls, they let a room close for privacy or dissolve into the next without ever interrupting the run of floor and wall behind them. The kitchen asks more of the palette than anywhere else, but not by choice. Its garden-facing floor sits a level below the rest of the house, sunk to give the step-free opening onto the patio the height and privacy it needed, and the garden rises to meet it in gentle terraces rather than one flat lawn. It is the room where the family’s life now gathers, open on every side, yet it keeps to the same quiet restraint as the rest of the house. Oak joinery is built into the walls rather than standing apart from them, with beds, desks and vanities grown out of the fabric of the house, and switches and sockets recessed flush into the plaster so nothing breaks the run of a wall.
In the bathrooms, Carrara marble meets microcement underfoot, and basins and vanities are held clear of the floor, keeping the rooms light and uncluttered.
Date appointed — August 2023
Date commenced on site — June 2024
Practical completion date — November 2025
Credits
Architecture — Name Architects
Contractor — Builders Team
Structural Design — Devise Engineers
Joinery — E Squared
Glazing — Fluid Glass
Finishes — Lazenby, Hittoak, Carrara, Coalbrook
Photography — Lorenzo Zandri
Styling — Nina Lilli Holden