villa house
Notting Hill, London
A grand Holland Park villa, last touched in the 1980s, reimagined as a contemporary family home. The brief was substantial: a full-footprint basement extending beyond the front, back, and sides of the existing house, a large rear extension, a reconfigured roof creating additional bedroom space, a passenger lift, and a pool at lower ground level.
The existing house was retained as a brick shell. Everything else — circulation, plan, levels, the relationship between house and garden — was reinvented.
Studio Insight
Adding three thousand square feet of basement to a house is not the same as making the house work.
You cannot simply attach more space and hope the existing rooms know what to do with it. A house this size only succeeds if its circulation, its hierarchy, and its relationship to daylight are rethought as a single move. The basement here is not an annexe to the house above; it is an extension of it — connected by sightlines, daylight wells, and a sequence of rooms that read continuously from the front door downward.
The grandest gesture is the simplest: a ground floor that opens, uninterrupted, into a rear extension and onward into the garden. The house had to be reinvented around it.
