Mesh House
Architect: Alison Brooks Architects
Location: Belsize Park, London
Type: House
Year: 2024
Photographs: Paul Riddle Photography
The following description is courtesy of the designers. This project is a private house in Belsize Park, London, a neighbourhood renowned for its architectural character and experimental houses dating from the 18th to 21st centuries. The design is a sculptural response to an unusually narrow, triangular site and the neighbourhood’s diverse architectural languages, the ornate, of the surrounding neighbourhood’s ornate Victorian villas to the east. The form and language of Mesh House absorbs these references while adhering to strict local planning regulations that limit building height.
Form and features
The building is faceted in both plan and elevation to create recessed and projecting bays. This folding geometry abstracts the highly articulated facades and roofs of Belsize Park’s 19th C urban villas into a continuous, folded surfaces and intersecting vectors, a mesh. This interplay, between solid and void, roof and façade, enables the house to become a singular, textured object, embedded in its context.
By transforming the typical deep plan London house-type into an elongated courtyard villa, the centre of the house is filled with light; its interiors are enmeshed with the landscape. The organic plan geometry of the house is anchored by a central ‘spine’ from which walls radiate. Internally, the mesh engenders a meandering sequence of single and double height spaces to create a fluidly interconnected, informal setting for contemporary family life.
Kitchen, dining and living spaces wrap around a central, west facing courtyard. The main living space bridges between this courtyard and the rear garden. This space can be understood as a pavilion from which one can look back into the house through layers of transparency, across a captured landscape.
In section, the house becomes more transparent as one moves from the street to the rear garden, so that the enclosed rooms of the first floor appear to hover above the main living spaces. This allows the interior to become part of a continuous landscape of exterior terraces and courtyards.
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Surprising vertical spaces open to the sky, lightwells animate the interior. The first-floor stair landing is visible from the kitchen and courtyard and living room; a bridge between voids, it creates the atmosphere of a treehouse. The entire house is clad in small format copper shingles that permit the roof, facades and bay windows to form a unified whole.
Materials
Following rigorous analysis and testing, copper was selected as the primary material for the new house, permitting the precise, crisp detailing of roof, façades, and bay windows to form a unified whole. Detailed as small-format hung shingles and set out at 45 degrees, the copper façade wraps around the building; blurring the boundary between wall and roof, while accentuating the building form. The copper upper storeys subtly contrasts with the cream brickwork on the side walls of the ground floor level, reflecting the subtle tonal variances of the neighbouring buildings and anchoring the building to the ground. By wrapping the brickwork around the corners and into the building, the garden appears to extend inside the house.
Project Team
- Client: Private
- Architect: Alison Brooks Architects
- Project Team: Alison Brooks, Wanja Wechselberger, Sophie Bates, Ross McDonald, Vinay Patel, Jun Kondo, Ceri Edmunds, Antonio Callejon Nache, Kate Albertucci, Nelson Carvalho
- Structural Engineer: Akera Engineers
- Contractor: HCCC Construction
- Services: Houghton Greenlees & Associates Ltd
- Quantity Surveyors: Measur Construction
- Landscape Architects: Tim Osborn Architects
- Environmental Consultant: OMC Associates (Arboriculturist)
- Rights of Light: McBains Cooper Consultancy Ltd
- Roofing: KME / TECU Oxid Copper; Roles Broderick
- Party Wall: Sara Burr Associates
- Staircases: Canal Engineering
- Glazing: Fineline Aluminium
