Wimbledon House

A generous brick villa nestles into a sloping site in leafy Wimbledon, with a closed street elevation to the north-east, and a more open and tiered garden side to the south-west. A significant slope enables the house to be entered on the middle floor, into the front-of-house spaces: hall and cloakroom, two workspaces, two guest suites, and a dramatic bridge connection to formal living space on the garden side of the house, with views out towards the river and Hampton Court. From the entry floor, you move down to informal living spaces, or up to the more private world of family bedrooms. All three floors are linked by connecting voids, double and triple height as well as a central staircase. Spaces are generous and, despite the formal composition of the house, deliberately flexible to allow the way the house is used to adapt as the family grows. The client’s original brief – for a traditional four-square plan and pitched roof – was challenged by the local authority’s DRP, which called for a more ambitious and modern villa, despite the location in the Wimbledon West Conservation Area. This pivotal moment in the project design process led us to a more ambitious and contemporary design, capable of responding better to the long, thin site. The house is tall, light and airy inside, while from the outside it is a deliberately solid brick volume, with a composition of glazed openings to the south-east elevation, and a series of generous terraces facing to the garden, which is home to a retained and venerable sweet-chestnut tree. Unlike the change in architectural arrangement, the client’s brief for a cool, robust and simple building was consistent from the outset. Fed up with overheating problems in their previous house, and the restless nights with their three children, the family asked for a building with lots of natural ventilation. The resulting design includes night-time purge cooling, with intake via ventilation panels secure behind hit-and-miss brick elevations, stack effect using the internal voids and the stair, and a large rooflight for hot air to exhaust at high level. High levels of insulation (to solid and glazed elements) reduce daytime heat gain in summer months, and the overall design has resulted in a low-energy, low-maintenance building. Provision was made for future installation of external blinds and awnings to the south-east and south-west facades, but this has not proven necessary in practice, despite one hot summer since completion. Conceived in 2014, constructed from 2017, and completed in 2021, the design process considered embodied carbon less objectively than it would be the case today. A sign of how fast we are moving towards a low-carbon future, though many of the ambitions of 2015 still apply: for a long-life, loose-fit home to be used in different ways by different generations, but with equal happiness over time.