Inventive brickwork draws inspiration from Victorian interiors at a Fulham home extension

Can you tell us a bit about the W House project Bureau de Change took on?

W House, in Fulham, is a rear extension and full interior refurbishment of a late Victorian semi-detached home. The property fronts a busy road and slopes down towards a narrow but spacious rear garden. The extension creates a new living space, connecting horizontally and intimately with the outdoors, and brings coherence to the whole scheme.

Who is W House for, and what was the brief?

The project is for a couple with two children. The client’s willingness to introduce a contemporary yet contextual element to a historically rich building aligned perfectly with our design process. Our approach, both internally and externally, tries to weave through elements and connections that reconsider how a narrow home on multiple levels can be experienced by a family with young children.

Were there any significant factors that influenced the design?

The site’s narrow configuration and progression from front to back strongly influenced our approach to the way the house is navigated and experienced. From the beginning, we set out to retain the existing side-gate access; this in turn was a driving force for introducing a volume at the rear with glazing on two sides, thus maximising the natural daylight in the main internal living spaces and most importantly the dining room, located in the middle of the plan.

What inspired the extension’s bespoke external brickwork?

The rear volume is inspired by a series of Victorian prefabricated moulding details found in historical joinery catalogues and pattern books of a local craftsman. The striking three-dimensional designs, with their intricate plays of light and shadow, are reinterpreted at various scales across the extension; the faceted rhythm at macro scale, with larger gestures in the walls and folded glazing openings, and the use of the contextual material, bricks, to create detail at micro scale.

The brickwork was carefully detailed to make the most of two standard bricks, while the visible corners and facets utilise six different brick specials by Forterra.

Can you explain how the interiors have been designed and the flow of spaces improved? 

The ground floor space is designed to introduce a strong horizontal connection from the front to the back garden. The site provides a constraint of dropping almost a metre in level. We embraced this challenge and created three distinct yet connected rooms cascading from front to back.

The plan layout gives a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the rear garden, whilst a central faceted stainless-steel volume provides a focal element and solid core to the ground floor, complementing the ornate features in the kitchen and new extension, while housing ample storage and the downstairs cloakroom.

What has been the project’s approach to sustainability?

The site is southwest facing with the rear receiving plenty of direct sunlight. We carefully designed the mass as to avoid large expanses of glazing, instead opting for punctuated openings. For the interiors we kept as much of the existing fabric as possible; the wooden flooring was sanded down and the existing ornaments throughout the house were repainted and celebrated.

Can you describe the main challenge and how you overcame it? 

A common challenge we face in many urban projects is how best to utilise the front-facing rooms. At W House, the site fronts a very busy road and so we opted for triple-glazed windows, which helped transform both the first-floor playroom and the front kitchen into enjoyable spaces with excellent acoustic and thermal insulation. The small front garden and planting also provides an extra degree of separation.

What is your favourite detail in the project? 

The brickwork’s intricacy, which has blended the threshold between the exterior and interior. Externally, the pattern that emerges by rotating the bricks creates a sense of movement and texture visible from every angle. Internally, the bricks have a more unexpected impact on the wider experience of the house. As you walk toward the folded windows the ornate edges of the bricks forming the lintel become strikingly clear. On a sunny day the brick edges cast delicate shadows that echo the Victorian mouldings present on the kitchen ceiling. These shadows are reminiscent of ethereal fabric edges of a curtain.

Are there lessons which might be applied elsewhere?

The compact and restricted nature of the existing building meant that interventions had to be carefully weighed up against any loss of useable room space. However, the simple move of creating vertical connection by removing a small part of the first floor directly by the entrance immediately transformed the experience of a narrow and divided house. We were reminded of the many opportunities present, even in a restricted site, for simple yet effective interventions that changes the daily life of the users.

Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos are co-founders of Bureau de Change

Key data:

Total contract cost Confidential
Area of extension 56m²
GIFA cost £3,300/m²