The tour

The entrance to the house is via a walled garden, shaded by existing Lime and Horse Chestnut trees. The cantilevered first floor creates a sheltered entrance beneath which a wide timber-clad high security entrance door provides level access into a generous hallway. Cycle storage, bin storage and meters are located at entrance.

The hallway provides level access to the front stair, a ground floor bedroom and a bathroom and the kitchen/breakfast bar area. The front stair serves two bedrooms, one facing west over the entrance, and the other east onto a first floor skylight garden.

At the rear of the lower living floor a second stair provides access to a generous mezzanine with views over the double height living area and the central courtyard garden.

Beyond the courtyard, and accessed through a glazed conservatory link, which in winter will act as a solar collector, lies an annex. The annex has a separate kitchen/dining/living area opening onto a small facing garden and has a first floor bedroom. The annex will be accessed from the main house.

Into The Woods

All mature trees and a self-sown ‘urban hedgerow’ of ivy, hawthorn, elder and brambles, will be retained as an integral part of the design. The trees, some of whose trunks are within centimetres of the south facade, were documented in detail using point-cloud laser scanning to allow the building volumes to be adjusted to allow for each
individual tree.

The house, which occupies a part of London that was once at the heart of The Great North Wood will sit on a suspended steel deck supported on mini-piles. All surface rainwater will be redirected back under the house to minimise impact on root habitat.

The building volumes are arranged around a sequence of small courts, and a rear annex offers the possibility of separate self-contained accommodation. Conceptually the aim is to create within the house the sense of a journey through trees, a linear walk in the woods, responding specifically to the different tree species and other vegetation and their individual characteristics as one moves through the house.

Glimpses of the trees outside, filtered sunlight with shadowy silhouettes of vegetation through translucent screens, timber lining of interiors and a blurring of internal and external planting will all help to reinforce this effect.

''I found far more answers in the woods than I ever did in the city'''

–MARY DAVIS