Fletcher Crane Architects inserts a three-bedroom house in the undercroft of a 17-storey tower
A new three-bedroom house designed by Fletcher Crane Architects has been deftly tucked into the undercroft of a 17-storey 1960s modernist tower in west London.
Designed by Trehearne, Norman, Preston & Partners for the Church Commissioners, the tower forms part of the Water Gardens estate, north of Hyde Park, which appears as three towers on a podium on the Edgware Road (a lusher landscape is to the rear), and was originally conceived as luxury residences.
The Church Commissioners was also the client for the new house – known as the Water Gardens Pod – which sits on one of the elevated platforms linked to the base of the main tower. The mosaic-clad form “is conceived as though the addition has been excavated and subsequently pulled from the vertical host building”, says the architect.
The Pod is entered through the main tower. Its open-plan kitchen and dining space have fully glazed walls overlooking the split-level landscaped water gardens in the distance. A glass link spans between the living, dining and kitchen areas within the footprint of the existing building and the mono-pitched pod, which accommodates three inward-looking bedrooms and three bathrooms.
“The master suite offers a corner window over the three rectilinear ponds, the dancing water jets and biodiverse landscape”, says the architect.
The Pod is constructed from cross-laminated timber (CLT), supplied by Binderholz and prefabricated and installed by G-frame Structures. The timber is exposed internally, but externally the Pod is clad in black and white mosaic tiles, “reinforcing through material, the colour, texture and rhythm, the essential dialogue of the towers, whilst the remaining elements of the platform have been planted with meadow grasses”, says the architect. “This intervention mimics and forms a visual extension to the overall context”.
