VIVID HOUSE

Playful refurbishment to a listed townhouse near Elephant & Castle

SE11

Vivid House is the refurbishment and reconfiguration of a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse near Elephant and Castle. YARD Architects worked closely with bold and creative clients who had set their sights on a fun and colourful home for their young family. Arranged over four storeys, the lower ground floor was previously a separate studio unit, which was reintegrated back into the house enabling a new open lower ground floor level for family life to take hold. An existing rear extension was given a facelift, with new openings and a dramatic two-tone trellis cladding.

Our clients for Vivid House briefed us on the requirement to create a happy home from the outset. This was envisaged to be through the use of colour, with a strong belief in the positive psychological effect of surrounding yourself with colour to aid happiness. We also wanted to increase natural daylight as much as possible, and make the house comfortable to live in.

The dramatic two-tone trellis cladding adds depth and interest to the clearly contemporary façade, which is tucked behind a brick wall separating the garden from the street. It also acts as a trellis to enable plants to climb and occupy it over time, with a brise soleil integrated into the design with cables to train an existing vine to provide solar shading.

A key driver for the project was having to work around the existing unusual side access to the house, and the stairs which cut through the middle of the lower ground floor plan half-way up the height of the space. The dramatic arch between the kitchen and dining area of the house was developed to conceal this staircase, which is then revealed in a glance with a circular porthole through to the entrance lobby. The strength of the arched profile was then repeated throughout the scheme, from large scale interventions through to small scale detailing.

A snug is incorporated at the front of the house, where a lower ground floor entrance door opens out to the garden square beyond. A new staircase was slotted in alongside the original stairs, with the new lobby envisaged as an internal courtyard, with mirror cladding behind the stairs and concealed lighting to wash over an array of ferns and other dark loving planting.