Elizabeth Mews Home / Trewhela Williams

Elizabeth Mews Home / Trewhela Williams

Textual content description offered by the architects. The mission includes a storage conversion and floor ground refurbishment of a courtyard home on a quiet cobbled mews in Primrose Hill, North London. Elizabeth Mews falls throughout the Belsize Park Conservation Space which signifies that any proposed street-facing alterations to the storage wanted to be fastidiously thought-about in order to not hurt the present character of the mews. The repeating wood-paneled doorways are a legacy from the mews’ origins as stabling and coach lodging and stay a key contributor to its general character. It was due to this fact felt most applicable to sensitively repurpose the present door opening with a carpentry insert.

The storage door was reimagined as a finely crafted oak finned display screen developed to reconcile the competing concerns of admitting daylight and air flow into the house while offering privateness screening and photo voltaic shading. When seen from the gateway to the mews, the flutter of fins retains an impression of solidity which unravels like turning pages on strategy. This playful choreography of planes, volumes, and edges remembers the plywood sculptures of artist Donald Judd. The sculptural simplicity of the general carpentry composition was achieved by hid restraint fixings, tightly abutting joints, grain alignment, a unifying white oil end, and frameless detailing of the glazing. Set again behind the central fins, this glazing unit can tilt as a window for cross-ventilation, or flip inwards as a door to permit the household cat to enterprise out.

The architectural strategy respects the established fenestration order of the mews, while providing a quietly dignified evolution of its character. The enlivened frontage contributes larger visible animation, passive surveillance, and illumination to the neighborhood.  The hope is for the mission to set a constructive precedent for different neighbors to observe go well with with their very own storage conversions and proceed this incremental revitalization of the ground-level avenue scene.

Internally, the bottom ground plan is re-organized on its front-back axis alongside a 9m lengthy galley kitchen spanning the total depth of the property linking the road to an present courtyard. In the direction of the rear, the kitchen expands right into a eating space, earlier than contracting right into a small cosy seating space past. The calm, contemplative inside is outlined by tonal and textural nuances that assist the house to learn as a uniform entire. Central to it is a specialist Danish plaster, which unifies partitions and ceilings with a fabric-like floor suggesting undefined textiles. The worktop is shaped from a cloudy white Mugla marble; its weighty edge establishes a visible hierarchy over the delicately pressed metallic shelf above. These two linear components are separated by a band of Carrara-flecked terrazzo tiles. Shade is used sparingly however with precision. The rosy heat of the Douglas Fir planks is complimented by the brushed copper accents, the mottled burgundy leaves of the Acer Palmatum Fireglow, and rose quartz cushions to the cosy.