Clapton House
A new family home on a tight infill site
Location: Hackney, London
Client: Private
Contractor: H.A. Marks
Images: Charles Hosea
Year: 2018
*Hackney Design Awards 2018: Commended
*Hackney Design Awards 2018: People’s Choice Winner
*Dezeen Urban House 2019: Longlist
*Living Etc. 2020: Best Architect for Complex Sites
This is an imaginative COR-TEN clad new house, shoehorned into a tight infill site. The judges commended the sequence of spaces from the compact ground floor, leading to open-plan and light-filled upper rooms. A square, tiny courtyard at the rear makes excellent use of this limited and constrained piece of land.
Hackney Design Awards Judges
The use of entrance tiles from the previous builder’s yard on the site was a nice touch. Likewise, netting in place of guardrails, was particularly appropriate in this innovative and fun architectural design.
Hackney Design Awards Judges
Clapton House is a three-bedroom infill family house on a tight site in the Chatsworth Road area of Hackney. On the ground floor are three bedrooms arranged around a courtyard. From the ground floor hallway rises a single flight of stairs which lead up to an open plan living, dining and kitchen on the first floor.
In the first floor space the client wished for as much height as possible; the trick is pulled off by connecting a sequence of distinct spaces - dining, kitchen and living defined by changes in levels, scale and height.
The second flight of stairs leads to an office on the second floor which in turn leads onto an expansive roof deck; keeping a low profile between the neighbours’ roof tops.
The house plays with scale; using oversized windows and openings to create a greater feeling of space across the courtyard, picking up precious longer views and providing a strong connection to the street.
