Sergison Bates has developed the site of a former sheet metal factory in Lavender Hill, London, into a community of nine dwellings with a courtyard garden at its heart in  Patrick Lynch enjoys the uncanny sensation of stepping into the backyard of a busy London street and being transported to an entirely different world.

Buildings.

The brick walls are given variety and texture with a carefully calibrated composition of pilasters, articulated window lintels and a frieze of two “soldier courses” twisted by 45 degrees that forms the building’s crown.

Sergison Bates’ new building at Clapham, nine apartments to rent for Marston Properties, sticks in the memory like an image from a folk tale. Part miniature castle, part microcosmic garden, the evocatively named Lavender Hill housing embodies many of the practice’s interests in type and tectonics that have characterised its output over the past 25 years or so. It’s curiously absolutely embedded in its situation and place, and also somewhat uncanny and other. It’s as if the quality of air and light changes as you enter under the archway and move through the thickness of the castle-like walls, arriving refreshed and surprised into a tiny verdant courtyard at the heart of the scheme.

This “charged void” (as the Smithsons might have said) isn’t alien or universal like a lot of high modernist and postmodernist architecture that seems somehow to be straining to become a fragment of Italy displaced under northern skies. Rather, the atmosphere created by the pale bricks and painted timber is more anonymous and specific. Each tactile detail is richly observed, every threshold carefully calibrated. You are definitely somewhere very specific – in tune with the weather and cultural conditions of south London – it’s just that the architecture seems to be somewhat anonymous and strange.

The materials palette gives the sense of industrial warehouse units converted into dwellings and a sense of calm that is almost romantic in feel.

At the same time, the architectural design quality is very positively contributing to a sense of peaceable containment and discreet social wellbeing. Colours seem more intense there, plants trembling in sunlight and slight breezes seem more animated and alive than normal. Like good works of art in general, as Hans-Georg Gadamer suggested in The Relevance of the Beautiful, you really have to walk up to and engage with architecture in order for it to “enrich your feelings for life”.

How the architects achieve this life-enriching effect is worth examining in detail. This is architecture that arises not from the imposition of an autonomous egomaniacal will on to asite, top-down, but from the site conditions themselves. In this case, in common with Stephen Taylor’s project for Baylight Properties at Fulham (which I wrote about for AT 304, published in January 2020), the site for new housing is in some ways anon-site, or rather a site discovered at the centre of an urban block that did not originally strike the speculative builders of Victorian London as a natural place for dwellings. Instead, they placed light-industrial workshops at the centre of the backs of terraced streets. Over time, as the original structures were replaced by factory units, these sites became a sort of blind spot in urban life. Remnants of the Industrial Age, often ramshackle and crumbling, blocking light and accruing weeds, these dilapidated sheds are slowly being replaced by a new form of sophisticated urban housing: the courtyard garden type.

Apartments overlook a tiny verdant courtyard at the heart of the scheme.

At Fulham, Taylor carved out space for four detached houses in-between the intricately competing demands for daylight and sunlight (for existing and new residents), overlooking constraints and the whole plethora of planning rules at sites like these make designing agame of super-complex four-dimensional chess. At Clapham the response is equally skilful and successful, but this time the answer is not houses for sale but apartments for rent. There are nine of them, arranged around a central court, with various ingenious responses to the overlooking/daylight restraints that torture less adept designers (and less patient and considerate developers).

Practice partner Stephen Bates describes the design as a walled garden, and indeed the periphery (made up of a number of separate party wall agreements) is largely blank. Instead of windows, the new residents benefit from a series of individual courtyards and terraces arranged towards the periphery of the site, bringing daylight into the depth of the apartment plans and creating a delightful sense of propinquity and communality. Instead of the usual stacked uniformity of the London terraced house type that typifies this part of London (and indeed most of England), the dwellings at Lavender Hill are house-like, but also convivial and layered in section. Living rooms are often placed above bedrooms, and residents look down, up, across and through adjacent rooms –an effect that seems somewhat Levantine, and which also recalls courtyard housing in Belgian cities and the spatial and material porosity of Berlin Höfe.

Ampetheatre

This uncanny effect, of being both deeply within a back yard of a London street and simultaneously somewhere else altogether, is amplified by the choice of Danish bricks and painted softwood boards and beams. On the one hand, as Bates observed to one of the residents we met, the exposed timbers in the rooms are designed to make them feel like typical English industrial warehouse units that have been converted into dwellings. On the other, the atmosphere is slightly monastic, albeit reminiscent of the secular convent character of aBelgian béguinage. The close intimacy and dignified, gregarious silence of English almshouses also come to mind.

Quite extreme adjacency and discreet communality is made possible by real architectural skill; staggered planting around the entrances, and layers of textiles hanging within the layered brick facades unify the arts of landscape and interior design into a satisfying and coherent whole. There is a palpable sense of pleasurable harmony emerging from difference, just as you find in neighbourhoods where residents know and respect each other. Already, only a month or so after occupation, the communal garden is being adopted and amended by individuals living comfortably within the collective – a sure sign of social and psychological good health.

Ampetheatre

Above.North-south section through apartments and central courtyard. Below: North elevation.

In this way, the scheme seems like a positive prototype for a new form of intense urban living and as a new archetype for tight city sites, encouraging amore metropolitan and social form of dwelling than the English terrace type usually allows for. In architecture, virtue is arguably most often born out of necessity, its ethical and aesthetic stance transcending practical and technical problems rather than ignoring them. And from this close reading of a situation, a type of imagination emerges that is both legible and comprehensible to inhabitants, and somewhat mysterious to visitors.

I wonder whether this is the subtle game that architecture entails when it’s careful and good –binding residents together in daily acts of complicity and consideration, unified in discretion? Lavender Hill is full of lessons for architects and students today. It is also a singular act of the imagination, uncanny and slightly odd, homely and unusual at once. Visiting is like stepping beyond a veil into a secret garden and slightly foreign world, somewhat askance to everyday reality but emerging from it. Which might be a useful definition of really good architecture, in every circumstance.

Additional Images

Credits

Client
Marston Properties
Architect
Sergison Bates
Contractor
Uprise Construction
Cost consultant and project management
Marick Real Estate
Structural Engineer
Symmetrie
MEP and sustainability
Mendick Waring
Landscaping
Miria Harris

Windows and glazed screens
FS Windows
Green roofs
Bauder
Brick manufacturer
Egernsund Tegl, Denmark
Brick supplier
AllAbout Brick
Floor tiles
Ketley Bricks