Twin Spirits

“I started to think, get over it. Just a buy a mid-terrace Victorian house.” Architect Graeme Williamson spent nearly 25 years searching for a plot of land in London on which to build a home for himself – and it was only after countless early mornings out on his bike looking for sites, getting outbid at auction and other failed attempts that an opportunity landed in right his lap. The house he has subsequently designed and built for his family on the 65 sqm site was definitely worth the wait.

“I was talking to a developer about another job and he said, ‘we’ve been given this to look at but it’s probably too small for us – do you want to look at it?’,” says Williamson about the plot of land. It was an old garage that had planning permission for a one-bedroom home but Williamson knew he could do better – and by some skilled space-manipulation the finished house has three bedrooms (thanks to extending into the lower ground) and manages to feel generous everywhere else, too.

Williamson calls the project Twin House, not just because of its twin-gabled form but because it represents a symbolic merging of two families: he and his wife Melanie both have a daughter each (now in their late teens), so the family is a blended one. “We’ve got two of everything: two families, two cats, two children,” he says, and this duality became the driving conceptual force behind the design.

The ‘twins’ are offset at the front, breaking up the house’s mass and providing an entrance courtyard. The gables are an echo of the stock Victorian terraces that surround the house, but Williamson’s design is a far more contemporary proposition, clad monolithically in Viroc cement board, a composite material made from pine wood particles and cement. Its velvety patina is not an off-the-shelf option: the couple spent two weeks sanding down all 220 sqm of cladding to achieve the desired finish.

The house’s brick-red shade is another nod to the Victorian vernacular, and the colour is picked up inside, too. Melanie, a graphic designer, designed the Moroccan cement tiles that run through the ground floor: the bright-red kitchen joinery (contrasted with natural timber on the facing run of units), red-legged dining table and red occasional chair in the main bedroom provide a narrative that weaves through every floor.

An ’upside down’ layout means that the girls’ bedrooms are in the basement and the main bedroom is on the ground floor, with living space on the first floor. Generous ceiling heights on this top level, open to the eaves, were designed as a way to counteract the rooms’ diminutive footprint: “if you have a two-and-a-half-metre ceiling height on a tight site, the rooms will feel small, so we made a four-and-a-half-metre high ceiling, and it feels way bigger than it actually is,” says Williamson, who has even managed to tuck in an office space on a mezzanine level above the kitchen.

Given the small size of the plot, the decision to create a really generous hallway seems a radical one, but it has worked brilliantly to immediately create a sense of space in this house. A white steel staircase runs between the floors, with a straight flight down to the basement – the large light-well it creates providing as much daylight as possible to the lower bedrooms – that then twists upwards to access the upper floors. Combined with the patterned tiles and some houseplants, it feels positively patio-like: more like Barcelona than Hackney. The house is full of light, in fact, with Williamson deftly working within the constraints of the site, balancing privacy issues with optimising views, and harvesting as much daylight as possible without overheating the rooms.

Following the lucky acquisition of the plot, there was one more turn of events that changed the fortunes of this house: when the garage next door accidentally caught fire, it also burned down the patch of land next to Williamson’s site, taking a sycamore tree with it. The architect managed to acquire this plot, too, creating a small garden, accessed from the hallway and adjacent bedroom – much-needed outside space in this urban setting.

The unusual nature of much of this house, from the layout and materials to the bold distribution of space, creates a compelling calling card for Williamson’s work. “In line with most prototypical architect-built houses, there’s an opportunity to do something you wouldn’t necessarily convince a client to do,” he says. “It’s given us a lot of freedom to make what is quite an experimental house, I think.”