While most architectural projects involve creating additions, this project by Bunkall Architects primarily involved taking away.

An existing infill extension to a Victorian London terrace was removed to create an internal courtyard.

A new concrete box dressed in Oak creates an outdoor platform and below provides cellar storage for the client, a wine merchant.

Accessed directly from the lower ground floor kitchen.

The external use of the ‘domestic’ Oak as decking, cladding, handrails, windows and doors blurs the distinction between indoor and outdoor.

And creates the space a feeling of an ‘outdoor room’.

The intention is for this ‘room’ to ultimately become overgrown with plants growing in pots up the walls, off the window ledges and climbing the spindles.

At the basement level sits a flat also owned by the client and rented to friends. The flat’s bedroom sits adjacent to the courtyard.

The client wanted to create privacy for the flat so a flush, one-way, mirrored door was inserted that allows views out and required light into the bedroom but on the side of the main house, reflects the garden.

(although they didn’t mind being overlooked themselves)

Contrastingly at night when the bedroom lights are on, the door forms a lantern onto the courtyard. The surfaces of the new courtyard space make extensive use of reclaimed materials.

The Oak comes from flooring originally used in French cattle railway carriages, the hexagon terracotta tiles are reclaimed and the Portland Stone for the stairs, which was in the space as found but taken up and reconfigured, was originally reclaimed from the Paternoster square development.

The existing party wall is painted in Earth Red colour. The colour seeps through the new oak windows that overlook it creating an inside outside dialogue that invigorates both house and courtyard.

Creating the sense of an excavated space.