housing
William Tozer Associates, 2025
244 Albion Road, Stoke Newington, N16 9JP
The project entails a full-width rear extension and refurbishment of a late-Georgian townhouse, which has been transformed into a contemporary home for a young family. The works include landscaping to the rear and a new garden room.
Finsbury Park, Manor House
Canonbury, Stoke Newington
106, 236, 476, 73
The property is a Late-Georgian Terrace House arranged over several levels. Unfortunately this means that there is no wheelchair access.
We will be providing informal tours of the house where visitors can ask questions directly to the architects.
09:30–14:00
The house, situated in Stoke Newington is a full-width rear extension and refurbishment of a late-Georgian townhouse, which has been transformed into a contemporary home for a young family. The original house was designed by master builder Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855) and features a rare ‘crinkle crankle’ wall to the rear garden. While not a Listed property, the project curates and re-frames the context and history of its site, while capturing the open-endedness of the processes of design, demolition and construction.
Dominated by crisp, flat natural top light, and framing views of tree trunks, the house extension is a modest tribute to the Nordic Pavilion by Sverre Fehn, designed between 1958 and 1962 to provide Nordic light in Venice for the Biennale. The courtyard garden between the kitchen extension and the outbuilding is conceived of as an exterior room. The two new buildings are clad in different materials, but are visually tied together by their simple yet sculptural rectilinear forms. The interior is similarly composed of sculptural forms, but at a smaller scale—the kitchen units and island, and a blade wall to the staircase—all of which loosely divide the open-plan space into different functions. The open-riser staircase references the Stack works of Donald Judd, while the plaster form of the closed-riser staircase in the kitchen ceiling is a nod to the work of the early modernist architect Adolf Loos.
The house has a clearly defined design approach resulting in spaces that are emotionally and intellectually engaging, challenging, and stimulating—while also maximising efficiency, practicality, and durability for our clients. For these reasons, the spaces and forms intentionally do not appear overtly designed, and materials have been selected that will wear in rather than wear out. Fixtures and fittings have similarly been chosen to support the project’s larger design objectives, rather than being design statements in themselves.
