Workplace S&M has turned a dark Victorian townhouse in Kensington into a light-filled home for 2 art collectors. A three-storey rear extension, bespoke architectural interventions and commissioned artworks integrate to produce a house that works equally as a family home and a thoroughly curated gallery.
Office S&M has finished the renovation and extension of a Victorian townhouse in Kensington for a pair of art collectors moving from East London. Positioned within a conservation area, the project changes a series of dark, detached interiors with a sequence of light-filled home created around the clients’ growing collection of modern art and craft. The refurbishment consists of a three-storey rear extension and new first-floor terrace, transforming a conventional household home into one that balances daily domestic life with the experience of moving through a gallery.
The restrictions of the website highly informed the architectural action. Surrounded by securely packed balconies and facing north, the house had restricted access to daylight and outdoor area. Instead of depending on big locations of glazing, the architects presented a series of roofing system lanterns that draw natural light deep into the strategy. At ground flooring level, a tessellated glulam rooflight illuminates the kitchen area and living areas while developing a private terrace above. Greater up, a generous rooflight and curved soffit wash the central staircase with daytime, developing a vertical route through your home that ends up being progressively brighter as it ascends.
The task was developed around the property owners’ ambition to produce a setting for their collection while commissioning new work from independent designers and makers. Bespoke components are integrated throughout your home, replacing conventional domestic fittings with crafted pieces including cast sinks, sculptural sanitaryware and custom-made furnishings. Instead of dealing with art as decoration, the style blurs the distinction in between architecture, furniture and things, enabling everyday spaces to operate as locations of display without compromising their practicality.
The interior palette reacts directly to the collection. Colours have been chosen to support instead of take on the art work, while thoroughly located rooflights offer even daytime without exposing paintings and objects to direct sunshine. Throughout your house, handcrafted information by artists and craftspeople strengthen the customers’ longstanding relationship with London’s independent creative community.
Individual narratives are ingrained within the architecture. A fern and moss garden inhabits the north-facing yard, framed by a terrazzo landscape inspired by the Spanish island where the homeowners married. In other places, a folded mirror reflects light to form the image of a setting moon when seen from the kitchen, offering the task its name. Slender trees rising through the yard establish visual connections in between the lower home and the terrace above, strengthening the relationship between the various levels of the house.
Storage and blood circulation have actually been dealt with as important elements of the architecture. Joinery is carefully incorporated into darker locations of the plan to maintain open, uncluttered living spaces while increasing natural light. A continuous charred orange wall covers through the ground flooring before increasing alongside the staircase, creating a ribbon of colour that links the different floorings and supplies a strong spatial identity within the otherwise restrained interior.
The result is a home that integrates the practical requirements of contemporary domesticity with the atmosphere of an art gallery. Through thoroughly managed daytime, bespoke workmanship and a series of extremely personal interventions, Workplace S&M has actually created a home in which architecture and collection become inseparable, producing interiors that are both extremely functional and deeply private.
Customer
Oliver and Marissa
Architect
Office S&M
Contractor
IC&T Projects
Structural engineer
Shire Consulting
MEP
P3R
Building control
Clarke Banks
Landscape designer
AARDE
Landscape designer
FFLO
Principal Designer (CDM)
CDRM Solutions
Furniture
Fred Rigby