Mesh House | Alison Brooks Architects

Background

This project is a rare example of a new build house in Central London, in the Hampstead Conservation Area. Alison Brooks Architects was commissioned by a private client to design a new model of family home, tailored to the fluid, informal lifestyles of its five family members. The project site is in Belsize Park, Hampstead, one of London’s most characterful neighbourhoods, renowned for its architectural character and experimental houses dating from the 18th to 21st centuries. The design is a sculptural response to an unusually narrow, triangular site and the neighbourhood’s diverse architectural languages, the ornate, four-storey Victorian villas to the east. The form and language of Mesh House absorbs these references while adhering to strict local planning regulations that limit height and protect neighbour’s access to light. The result is a new reading of contemporary domestic architecture.

Concept

The client desired a generous and transparent house that took advantage of its primary south facing orientation. Our design approach was inspired by the character and material of neighbouring Victorian villas, and Hampstead’s grand Arts and Crafts houses, with their pronounced bay windows, animated rooflines and hung terracotta tiled façades. These elements have been abstracted into a series of faceted planes that unify façade, roof and walls. The design was entirely generated in 3D CAD as a polygon mesh to resolve the geometric interfaces between built volume, protected light angles, existing building lines, and topography. The name describes both Alison Brooks Architects’ design tool for this project, as well as the idea of the house as a filter through which light, landscape and human connections are made. 

The key organising principle of the plan is its central courtyard that opens to the south. This courtyard subverts or ‘stretches’ the traditional Victorian archetype of deep plan and imposing orthogonal volume, embedding landscape light and at the centre of the plan. The elongated plan and central transparent court allow views through and between internal spaces to its three gardens; front, centre and rear. 

The house is porous and elongated, not only in plan, but in section. Ground, first and second floors are perforated by double and triple height spaces. Glazed apertures punctuate roof and ground planes. These vertical spaces and transparent planes allow visual and audible connections between floors, capturing views and pulling light into the deepest parts of the house. The architecture allows unexpected moments of connection to the sky and the passing of seasons, two of London’s rarest commodities.

Central to the concept and tactile experience of all Alison Brooks Architects houses is the stair. In the Mesh House, the stair is a winding ribbon of steel and timber, reflecting the informal geometry of the house.

Form and features

The building is faceted in both plan and elevation to create recessed and projecting bays. This folding geometry abstracts the highly articulated facades and roofs of Belsize Park’s 19th C urban villas into a continuous, folded surfaces and intersecting vectors, a mesh. This interplay, between solid and void, roof and façade, enables the house to become a singular, textured object, embedded in its context.

By transforming the typical deep plan London house-type into an elongated courtyard villa, the centre of the house is filled with light; its interiors are enmeshed with the landscape. The organic plan geometry of the house is anchored by a central ‘spine’ from which walls radiate. Internally, the mesh engenders a meandering sequence of single and double height spaces to create a fluidly interconnected, informal setting for contemporary family life.

Kitchen, dining and living spaces wrap around a central, west facing courtyard. The main living space bridges between this courtyard and the rear garden. This space can be understood as a pavilion from which one can look back into the house through layers of transparency, across a captured landscape.

In section, the house becomes more transparent as one moves from the street to the rear garden, so that the enclosed rooms of the first floor appear to hover above the main living spaces. This allows the interior to become part of a continuous landscape of exterior terraces and courtyards.

Surprising vertical spaces open to the sky, lightwells animate the interior. The first-floor stair landing is visible from the kitchen and courtyard and living room; a bridge between voids, it creates the atmosphere of a tree-house. The entire house is clad in small format copper shingles that permit the roof, facades and bay windows to form a unified whole. 

Methods and materials

Following rigorous analysis and testing, small format oxidised copper shingles was selected as the primary material for the new house, permitting the precise, crisp detailing of roof, façades, and bay windows to form a unified whole. Detailed as small format hung shingles and set out at 45 degrees, the oxidised copper façade wraps around the building; blurring the boundary between wall and roof, while accentuating the building form.

The oxidised copper upper storeys subtly contrast with the brickwork on the side walls of the ground floor level, reflecting the subtle tonal variances of the neighbouring buildings and anchoring the building to the ground. By wrapping the brickwork around the corners and into the building, the garden appears to extend inside the house.

The window frames are anodised to match the oxidised copper cladding, reflecting the slim profiles of window frames in adjacent buildings.

Photography: Paul Riddle (https://www.paul-riddle.com/)