A Courtyard House
Belgravia, London
A main house and a mews house, sharing a courtyard garden behind Sloane Square, reimagined as a single family home for an interior designer and her family. Both buildings were rebuilt — the main house gutted and restored to its original plan form, the mews house substantially redeveloped. A new basement was excavated beneath each building. The staircase from the original house was relocated to the mews, where it now organises a four-bedroom independent dwelling that operates as part of the larger home.
The architectural centrepiece is a two-storey rear conservatory, designed to evoke the Orangery at Kew — slim glazing bars, repeated detailing, and the volume of a garden building rather than an extension. It opens the back of the main house onto the courtyard and pulls daylight deep into the plan.
Studio Insight
The original brief had the basement running uninterrupted beneath both buildings and the courtyard between them. A protected tree in the garden — already too large for the space it occupied, and entirely outside the studio's power to remove — made that impossible. The under-garden basement was conceded; the basements under each building were retained.
What that left was a question about what the garden was for. Not a space to dig under, but a space to organise around — the architectural relationship between the main house and the mews now mediated by a courtyard, a tree, and the volume of a glazed conservatory that holds both buildings in conversation.
A house designed around a tree is a slower kind of house than a house designed in spite of one. The architecture has to accept the constraint and find the move that makes the constraint feel deliberate. The result here is a home in which the garden is no longer the space between the buildings — it is the space the buildings are turned toward.
