A self-built house by Alan Power Architects makes ingenious responses to light and a tight site
A “leftover scrap of urban land” in Stepney, east London, has provided architect Alan Power with the opportunity to build a 97-square-metre, two bedroom family house for his own use, responding to the quirks and constraints of the plot to make a building that is of its place.
Arranged over ground and lower-ground floors, the house occupies what was once an open yard and workshop, but later incorporated into the rear garden of a house on a neighbouring street. “The site is a slightly distorted rectangle, with the long axis aligned east to west, with the frontage along Redmans Road being the north elevation”, says the architect. A wooded garden belonging to a primary school is next door to the east, while private gardens adjoin the site to the south and west.
The design was shaped by the requirements of a conservation area, ad well as the desire to create privacy, receive sunlight, and enjoy a primary space that seems large in comparison to the scale of the house – “what Gaston Bachelard has called ‘intimate immensity’”, says Power.
The building has a low-key presence on the street: a long wall of second-hand stock bricks is punctuated only by a single entrance gate at the eastern end, and a patch of perforated brickwork next to the entrance, where bespoke inset solid glass blocks are used to light the internal staircase descending to the lower level. A glazed lantern that pops up above the level of the wall caps the house’s main living space, and is set against a backdrop of mature trees.
The L-shaped plan is laid out around a two-level courtyard in the south-west corner of the site; a ground-level terrace that is accessed from the main living room overlooks a lower-ground level courtyard shared by the two bedrooms.
The lozenge shape of the lantern light over the main living room was determined by efforts both to maximise the volume of the space and to draw in as much light as possible in both summer and winter. Its structure is a timber diagrid, supported by slim steel posts. “The trapezoid geometry emphasises the east-west orientation of the main space, which would otherwise have a more orthogonal character”, suggests Power. “The lantern is enclosed with a structural glass skirt. The level of translucency in the glazing is such that views in are prevented from the flats opposite, while ghosted views are provided outwards”.
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