Dominated by crisp, flat natural top light, and framing views of tree trunks, the house extension is a modest tribute to the Nordic Pavilion by Sverre Fehn, designed between 1958 and 1962 to provide Nordic light in Venice for the Biennale.
Project Name: Stoke Newington House
Studio Name: WILLIAM TOZER associates
Location: Stoke Newington, London
Size: 207 sqm
Photographer: Lukasz Wielkoszynski
The courtyard garden between the kitchen extension and the outbuilding is conceived of as an exterior room. The two new buildings are clad in different materials, but are visually tied together by their simple yet sculptural rectilinear forms.
The interior is similarly composed of sculptural forms, but at a smaller scale—the kitchen units and island, and a blade wall to the staircase—all of which loosely divide the open-plan space into different functions. The open-riser staircase references the Stack works of
Donald Judd, while the plaster form of the closed-riser staircase in the kitchen ceiling is a nod to the work of the early modernist architect Adolf Loos.
From the garden, one looks through a stand of birch trees into the top-lit interior of the new extension. Flat light from the rooflight mixes with light dappled through the canopies of the adjacent birch trees.
A mirrored splashback doubles the sense of space in the kitchen, which is spatially delineated by sculptural composition of rectilinear timber cabinets. The staircase to the ground floor appears as an abstracted form in the ceiling of the lower-ground floor, referencing the appearance of this feature in the early twentieth-century houses of Adolf Loos.
The Victorian features and character of the original Thomas Cubitt building are preserved through much of the interior of the house, with subtle modernisation of glazing, lighting, storage, and paint finishes.
