Hideaway House

Hideaway House is a Victorian semi-detached house in West London, renovated and subtly extended to demonstrate how small interventions can unlock the potential of a home without building big.

The clients, a couple with two children returning to the UK after more than a decade in the United States, were in need of an efficient and spacious family that honours the generous proportions and period character of their late-Victorian home while introducing the clean lines and materiality of modernist architecture.

The ground floor presented the greatest challenge. Four disconnected rooms, a cramped rear kitchen with a low ceiling, a faulty conservatory and almost no relationship with the courtyard garden made the home feel smaller than it was.

Rather than extend outward, Studio McW worked with the full width of the property, retaining the rear garden almost entirely. The redundant conservatory was removed and replaced by a new side extension. A second compact 9-square-metre addition was built on the opposite elevation over the side return. This cleverly houses a WC, utility room and larder alongside an externally accessed bike store and workshop. Relocating these everyday functions to the periphery freed the original footprint entirely. The floor level was dropped by 75 centimetres, creating a ceiling height that echoes the proportions of the period rooms above, the result is an open-plan kitchen and dining space that is light and uncluttered.

Working with joinery specialists Idle Furniture, both side extensions read internally as integrated walls of richly-stained oak paneling, one concealing the service spaces and the other anchoring a niche of built in timber seating. A dining table, collaboratively designed by the clients and the studio and crafted by Idle, sits at the heart of the space. Overhead glazing, diffused by white timber fins, washes the south-facing room in even light while disguising the 45-degree planning-compliant roof as a clean horizontal line.

Materials were chosen for their durability and how they would patinate to complement the original wood, stone, lime and brick. London stock brick reclaimed from the demolished kitchen was used to reconstruct the rear elevation.