Clifton Hill House

Patalab Architecture's refurbishment of a semi-detached Victorian villa in St John's Wood reworks a conservation-area home for contemporary family life. From the street the house reads as unchanged; inside, a series of double-storey moves transforms how the spaces connect.

The owners, a growing young family, needed the lower ground floor flat consolidated into the main house. The garden was the crux of the problem. Reachable only from the lower ground floor, its greenery felt cut off from the bedrooms and living spaces above.

Patalab's response threads the levels together. A new staircase descends from the raised ground-floor entrance hall to the kitchen at garden level, widening as it falls so the journey draws you down towards the garden. At its foot, a 4.5-metre glazed opening pulls the garden deep into the plan and, seen from outside, completes the composition of openings across the rear facade. At the front, a new void doubles the height of the entrance hall, claiming extra daylight through a first-floor window and giving the narrow space an unexpected sense of arrival. The master suite now looks down into this void, tightening its connection to the floor below.

The material palette stays deliberately quiet. Bespoke joinery in pale tones catches the new daylight and sets off darker Belgian basalt and stained oak. The weathered brick facades were left untouched to keep 150 years of patina, while window frames and render were picked out in soft grey.

Project credits: architecture by Patalab Architecture (Uwe Schmidt-Hess); photography by Lyndon Douglas.