Piers Gough’s “extrovert” Clerkenwell townhouse designed for Janet Street-Porter on sale for £3.75m
(Picture: The Modern House)A playful and “ostentatious” postmodern townhouse in Clerkenwell built for Janet Street-Porter in the eighties has gone on the market for £3.75 million.
The TV personality’s former home on a corner site in Farringdon, hailed as a “creative tour-de-force” when it was listed at Grade II in 2018, was designed as an “abstract portrait” of Street-Porter herself.
Designed by Piers Gough, of architecture practice CZWG, the four-storey house features a blue tiled roof, diamond-paned windows and external brickwork in four different shades, making it look as if a shadow has hit the building. A semi-circular balcony juts out over the street below.
The building’s exterior also features a huge steel lattice giving the building a “spiky” and fortress-like appearance — an intentional choice by Street-Porter who wanted to discourage unwanted visitors.
“I didn’t want a house that looked too friendly. I wanted a house that looked hostile,” she told the BBC programme Building Sights in 2014.
Gough was a friend of Street-Porter’s who she met during her brief spell studying architecture at London’s prestigious Architectural Association (AA).
She commissioned Gough to design the house, financing the project by selling her previous home, a barge repair workshop in Limehouse.
The house was one of six buildings by CZWG awarded listed protection in 2018 as part of Historic England’s bid to “stem losses of this important style of architecture”.
The other London buildings included Cascades in the Isle of Dogs and China Wharf in Southwark.
The listing entry praised Street-Porter’s house as an “extrovert and ostentatious example” of Post-Modern domestic architecture, adding it was a “highly personalised commission, reflecting the lifestyle and personality of the patron while enabling the architect strong creative expression.”
According to agent The Modern House, the house has four bedrooms with two on the ground floor and the main bedroom on the first floor up a stone staircase.
“The second floor serves as the main living space, open plan with a birch plywood ceiling and huge windows filled with the foliage of surrounding plane trees,” it said.
Through the dining area is a door to an external staircase leading to a lush decked roof terrace and a further bedroom behind the enormous, triangular glazing visible from the outside. This bedroom was originally a roof-top office Street-Porter designed to provide a sense of leaving the house to start work.
Street-Porter moved out of the Clerkenwell townhouse in 2001, around the corner to a new home she commissioned from another well-known architect, David Adjaye.
This property was fashioned out of a former tannery that had been in use as a studio by the artist Mark Quinn.
Called the Fog House (a name given by the architect but which Street-Porter criticized as “pretentious”), Street-Porter sold the property in 2016 and moved to Norfolk. The building was one of the private houses featured in this year’s Open House Festival.
