St Georges Avenue

My clients, a couple with two small children, set a challenging brief (in a good way!): to create a stylish and uncluttered kitchen that nonetheless had a sense of homeliness, an aesthetic for which they jokingly coined the term ‘rustic minimalism’. The overriding aim was to create views from the entrance through to the garden and to be able to see as much sky as possible from the kitchen - so a new opening was designed in which the glass disappeared into the side walls and ceiling to minimise the visual barrier between kitchen and garden. An equally important aim was to maintain a sense of historic continuity by retaining some existing features - a rustic dresser was repurposed in the new kitchen. A polished concrete floor and open oak shelves completed the ‘rustic minimalist’ aesthetic my clients were after.

Beaumont Road

My client, a child photographer with a small son, wanted a loft space which was both a studio for her work, and a getaway. The route up to the studio served as a kind of advertisement for her work - the staircase included display niches in the wall. Equipment from the studio could be easily tidied away to a cupboard on the landing, leaving an uncluttered room with a lovely view across the roof terrace below from a generous window seat.

Whitehall Park

The client, an extremely busy NHS consultant, wanted to create a more sociable space for herself and her teenage children - the kitchen was pokey and out on a limb, and cut off the dining room from the garden. Bringing the kitchen into the heart of the house and extending out had the effect of bringing everything closer to the garden; a window seat overlooking the garden provided an ideal place for children to do their homework while my client cooked.

St Leonard's Square

My client approached me wanting little more than a thermal upgrade to the plot-wide 1980s kitchen/dining extension (which was chilly in winter, too hot in summer), together with a makeover of her study and bathroom, and first floor roof terrace. Once it became clear how transformative these improvements could be, the project expanded to include the reconstruction of her potting shed.

My client is a wonderful gardener - her garden is abundant in a way which appears artless - so a close relationship between the interior and the garden was all important: a new skylit window seat, projecting out over a pond directly adjacent to the rear facade, reaches out to the garden; full height glazing frames the silhouettes of the foliage, and the Victorian terrace housing beyond. The extension and shed opposite, unified the garden though a shared pallet of natural materials - London stock brick, oak windows, copper trims, green roofs.

Summerhill Road

When my mother moved out of the family house in Oxford this provided a wonderful opportunity to transform what had proved a lovely home for my parents into a equally lovely, but very different, house for my family.

We did the usual things that architects do - we opened up the interior and introduced contemporary details and finishes - but we resisted changing the external fabric: we were proud of our restraint, when we changed just one window to improve the visual connection between the dining area and the garden.  Wallpapered sliding panels returned the rooms to their traditional proportions if we wanted to separate them temporarily. Details were not overly precious - we wanted my parents' furniture and IKEA furniture salvaged from our one bedroom flat to sit comfortably side by side.