maida vale townhouse
Maida Vale, London
A five-floor family home, refurbished from top to bottom. The clients had lived in the property for years, and the project set out to bring the whole house up to the same standard throughout.
The brief began as a renovation of the upper floors, with the lower ground floor to be left largely untouched. In practice, as the new work progressed, the existing rooms stopped reading as part of the same house. The scope expanded to a full refurbishment across all five floors — a wholesale replacement of services and electrics, reorganised circulation, and a unified spatial language from the entrance level down.
Studio Insight
A common assumption with phased projects is that the older work will hold its ground against the new. Most of the time, it doesn't. The standard of finish, the level of detail, and the spatial logic of new work tend to expose the existing rooms as something separate — and the project either grows to absorb them, or ends up reading as two houses stitched together.
This project was always going to need the whole house to feel like one home. Recognising that early — and resisting the false economy of keeping what wasn't going to hold up — was the design decision that shaped everything else. For us, this is where the real joy of architecture lies: in taking on the complicated, the challenging and the seemingly impossible, and creating a finished home that feels as though it was always meant to be there.
