The brief for this handsome bath stone house in Bradford-on-Avon, was to replace the ground floor kitchen and conservatory extensions (both from the 1990’s), with something that brought modern ideas of spatial flow, openness, and natural light into the ‘four-square’ layout of the original property.
The client’s expanding family also encouraged a sense of lightness and fun to be injected into the somewhat formal interior. This created a conceptual underpinning for the project, which was to challenge and loosen the austere principles of the original without de-valuing or undermining them.
Our proposal gradually erodes the Victorian sequence of rooms as you progress through the house to the principal living spaces of the kitchen, lounge, dining room and garden. Circular motifs are introduced to oppose the tyranny of the right angle and heavy, monolithic masonry starts to disintegrate into a lighter language of timber structure and glazing.
Externally the relationship between the interior and exterior is greatly improved and the principal façade is de-cluttered by stepping the additions back behind a ‘thick’ garden wall. The view on entering the property offers hints of the architectural playfulness beyond the formal façade whilst still managing to prioritise it.
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