Park House | zac monro

The family had finally found the rockstar house they wanted, in Brixton. The trouble was it was more like one left over after a Led Zeppelin party than the one fit for inviting Damon Albarn over.
It was in an incredible location, inside the beautiful Brockwell Park, but it was build in the 50s and really had seen better days.
It was dark, damp un-insulated haemorrhaging energy and divided up into a myriad of tiny rooms: and it needed to be the kind of light outward looking warm modern family home you’d want to bring your kids up in.

The solution (whilst carefully navigating through the planning process) was to pare back to the bones of the old house and then re-dress it in a simpler Architecture that would sit more sympathetically in the park.
Its increased size was hidden by being broken into 3 smaller scale interlocking volumes of: one wood to echo the parks’ trees, one blue-grey brick to match the urban context and one clean rendered box of glass to bring the garden into the main family spaces.
The whole with an upgraded level of comfort and arranged in a more C21st family way.

The specially detailed Hardwood cladding allowed the upper volume to appear lightweight and permeable within its natural context and did so using breathable materials.
The 3 huge flush 4.3m wide triple glazed windows were the 1st of their kind in this country, and allow the blue-grey polished concrete to heat up in the morning sun, without casing a nigh-time draft across their 13m length.
The surrounding garden in reflected in the huge expanses of glass and the shadows of the parks trees read over the solid volume from dawn to dusk.
At night the garden is the ‘uninvited dinner-guest’.