Surpassing the Standard

Hurray for the change-resistant previous homeowners of this house in Hampstead, north London. It’s part of a cluster of properties designed in the late 1960s by Ted Levy, Benjamin & Partners, and while the neighbouring houses had ripped out the slatted pine cladding that characterised the interior, this house has weathered the storm of unfashionableness. Architectural practice Studio Hagen Hall has now given the place a thorough overhaul, with its future-proofed fabric just as important as the mid-century aesthetic.

The new owners came to the practice’s founder, Louis Hagen Hall, with ideas to change the kitchen, bathroom and draughty windows, but he realised there was a bigger opportunity. “We started asking questions about the value they wanted to bring to the house in the future,” he says – meaning better insulation, healthier materials, lower energy bills – “and we didn’t have to go much further to peel back the house and give it the full treatment. The more they lived in it, the more they got excited about that idea.”

Putting to one side the period-piece timber cladding, Hagen Hall worked on the space planning as well as upgrading the house’s efficiency. “I’m a big fan of broken-plan and the ground floor was already quite nicely broken up,” he says, “but there was an opportunity to elevate it.”

The ceiling height was raised at basement level (reducing the height in the room above it) to turn a six-foot-high utility area into a liveable room that acts as a guest bedroom suite cum gym, while the attic is now an office space with an additional cosy sleeping area for guests. The kitchen’s pass-through hatch is now a bigger opening that better connects it to a dining area, while in the three existing bedrooms, openings have been realigned to give views all the way through the house, with full-height pocket doors, framing built-in storage as you walk in.

Internal insulation has been added to key areas of concrete and brick walls, as well as in the roof, with solar panels and an air-source heat pump for energy generation. Hagen Hall designed the windows himself, with frames that are a hybrid of aluminium externally and timber internally. “It’s not listed, but there was a committee for the group of buildings – we called them the ‘council of elders’, because many of them had lived there since day one – who wanted the fenestration to match the existing,” he says. His carefully thought-out design mimics the original single-glazed, sliding steel windows, but are vastly more energy efficient, plus there is the aesthetic value of the warm timber on the inside.

The joinery in his house, by Tim Gaudin of TG + Co, is a major triumph. Hagen Hall charged Gaudin with finding a timber that could match the existing South American Paraná pine, now an endangered species. “He tested out putting a pine Rubio woodstain onto cherry wood, and it just matched the effect of the 60-year-old sun-bleached pine,” he says. “The tone of it is absolutely amazing.” The stained cherry has been used throughout, for the kitchen cabinetry as well as for the extensive built-in storage that works its way around the architecture but never intrudes, such as the storage sitting under the windows in the bedrooms.

Hagen Hall explains how his clients (a young couple and their daughter) wanted to lean in to their love of mid-century American design – Los Angeles’ Case Study Houses, and the desert modernism of Palm Springs. There’s a built-in seating area in the stepped-down living space, with green upholstery that flows seamlessly down onto an identically coloured carpet; frosted stippolyte glass sliding doors with circular finger pulls in cherry and stainless steel kitchen; and barisol ceilings above the bathroom basins, warmly diffusing the light downward.

“We like to mix vintage with new,” explains Hagen Hall, so there is also loose furniture and lighting that feels contemporary with the house’s original age, including an Archie Shine sideboard that belonged to the homeowners in the more formal mezzanine living area, and vintage lighting from Louis Poulsen and Herman Miller. This is matched with some (newly bought) classics of 20th-century design like the Fritz Hansen PK80 daybed on the mezzanine.

The attention to detail of the joinery is matched elsewhere. “The entire house is set out according to a 100mm tile grid,” explains Hagen Hall, meaning that there are no cut floor or wall tiles anywhere, only whole ones, not only a challenge to design but a feat of installation for his tiler (who “did not like me very much” as a result, he jokes). There’s also a rhythmic repetition of colours and materials throughout, as well as thoughtful elements that make every room flow well, such as the glass coffee table that was custom-made with an angled notch at one end to exactly match the angle of the built-in sofa.

As for the pine, it’s been barely touched, very deliberately so. “There was an area that had a water stain from a 40-year-old bathroom leak, and a few holes where light fittings had been drilled in the past. We just left them. If something has a character and an age to it, then we want to tell that story and show the history,” says Hagen Hall. He has had to correct people when they congratulate him on house’s extremely cool staircase (in fact, an original feature), with its triangular wall of diagonally slatted pine rising up through the building. He may not be able to claim it as his work, but he can certainly call it his muse for this project.