It took 18 years, three teams of architects, a six-figure sum and more meetings with planning officers than Mary Redmond can remember, just to get to the point of being ready to start work.
But an epic project to turn a tumbledown garage into a family home is an outstanding example of how even the smallest plot can be transformed.
From the street the house that Mary built is rather extraordinary — guarded by a shutter of slim panels of gently rusting Corten steel, with its kitchen and living room on semi-public display, three bedrooms hidden below ground and two internal courtyards giving outside space and lashings of light.
The story begins way back in 1999. Mary, a property manager, had just bought a house in Stoke Newington in N16 with a view to using it as a buy-to-let property.
“There was a run-down double garage at the end of the garden, and I did think that I would like to do a development because it was in an ideal position on a corner site with access on to the road.”
Architects were hired and, on the advice of Hackney council, they drew up plans for a Victorian-style house to fit in with the rest of the area. However, this first attempt to develop the site ended in failure when the council’s planners deemed the 947sq ft site too small to be workable.
Mary appealed the decision, but it was upheld by a planning inspector and the project was put on the back burner.
Real life — in the form of two children — took over.
Mary’s grand design
The early Noughties saw an explosion in public interest in architecture. Grand Designs and its many imitators were on our screens, and Mary and her husband began to think that if they developed the site, they would like to do a bit better than some Victorian pastiche.
“We started to think that we wanted to do something special with it, though we didn’t know what to do,” says Mary. “Everyone told us there was no way we were going to be able to get a house out of the site. But we kept the idea alive.”
They found a new architect and in 2012 submitted an application for a courtyard-style house with a new basement level and a kitchen and living room above.
However, Hackney council planners remained unimpressed, raising the key concern that two of the bedrooms would face each other on either side of the larger of two courtyards punched through the centre of the house.
Mary appealed again and this time she emerged victorious, with the required planning permission in hand.
Needing to find a team to bring the plans to life, she hired Guttfield Architecture after being seriously impressed by one of their projects in Islington that she happened across in a magazine.
In 2016 yet another planning application was lodged, this time to make refinements and alterations to the proposals. The following year, work could finally begin on this 12-month project.
For Fred Guttfield, the practice founder, this meant choosing a suitable cladding for the house — he went for pale ochre bricks — adjusting the layout and the windows, adding solar panels, a green sedum roof for insulation and designing the striking “floating” steel staircase.
“Hackney were pleased because they did not like the old scheme, and when I came to them with something a bit more contemporary they were very, very positive,” he says.
For Guttfield, the crucial element was the way the house connected with the street. “The typical way to build this kind of infill house is to hide it behind a brick wall,” he says. “I thought that was a bit of an odd approach, about turning your back on the street rather than being a part of it.
“In Holland, for example, people who put up curtains are considered to be very suspicious — it is normal to be able to see into people’s homes. It is a very, very English thing to want to be completely private.”
The steel louvre shutter Guttfield created as an alternative gives the largely glass-fronted house some protection from the street while not cutting it off completely.
Eye-catching but private: from the street, a shutter of Corten steel fins allows privacy in the kitchen and living room, while three bedrooms are hidden below ground
Its individual fins are fixed in place but have been carefully aligned so that the living room area can’t be seen from the street, although distinct glimpses of the kitchen can: only the extremely body confident would want to nip to the kitchen to make a cup of tea in their underwear.
The project began in spring 2017 and Mary estimates that getting to the point of being able to start work, including the three lots of architects’ fees, numerous planning applications and appeals, not to mention an army of structural engineers and surveyors, cost around £100,000 — or a sixth of the entire cost of building the house.
On time and on budget
Her contractors, Talina Builders, brought the project in on time and for its £500,000 budget, and by spring last year the house was finished.
“When we saw how the house worked, it was quite amazing,” says Mary. “When you are downstairs you could be out in the country somewhere it is so quiet, private and relaxing. We really fell in love with it.”
Though at 1,205sq ft the property is not huge, there is room enough on the ground floor for an open-plan kitchen and living room, a cloakroom and a utility room.
The feeling of space is maximised with a simple palette of white walls, reconstituted white quartz work surface, oak-veneered plywood kitchen cabinet doors and concrete-effect floor tiles — used throughout the house in lieu of the far more expensive and more time-consuming poured concrete option.
With two glass walls, two glazed courtyards and several skylights, the ground floor is super-bright. The courtyards bring light down to the basement, too, while each of the three bedrooms has direct access on to one of these small outdoor spaces.
Since it has been finished Mary and family have stayed at the house themselves, allowed family and friends to use it and also rented it out for short lets. But that will change this year.
Perhaps the greatest seal of approval for the project comes from the Redmond family, who currently live in Highbury.
When their son, who wasn’t even born when the site was first bought, goes to university in the autumn and they don’t need quite as much space, Mary, her husband and their daughter plan to move in full time.
