A striking red-brick cube stands on a backstreet corner in Peckham, south London, its walls appearing to dissolve as they rise towards the top, where trailing plants spill through the brickwork, their dangling foliage giving it the air of an overgrown ruin.
Part monolithic block, part gossamer screen, this arresting house is the work of Surman Weston, a pair of young architects who, tired of answering to clients and contractors, decided to design and build this experimental home themselves.
“We always had a dream of doing a project without a client, and without handing everything over to the builders,” says Percy Weston, who lives in the house with his partner and three-year-old son (although the house is jointly owned with his fellow architect, Tom Surman). “We wanted to be able to decide things on site and experiment live as we went along,” says Weston. “So we put all our life savings, and the money from our 10 years of practice, into giving it a go.”
The gamble has paid off. The result is a house where every detail has been lovingly crafted in a way that would have been all but impossible – or prohibitively expensive – if done by a regular builder. Downstairs, exposed ceiling joists have been scarf-jointed, a traditional technique that uses wedges of timber, rather than bolts or screws, to join shorter lengths together. They sit on top of a big beam of larch, the log’s surface left scraped and exposed, as if hauled in fresh from the Devon woodland where it was sourced. Screw holes for the noggins (the pieces of wood between the joists) have been filled with little projecting dowels, with the precision of Japanese carpentry.
“Every time you ask a builder to do something that isn’t standard,” says Surman, “you can add a zero to the normal price. We’ve both worked on building sites before, but we’re not particularly skilled craftspeople. Most builders could do this, but they’re usually looking for the quick, easy way.”
In this case, the architects didn’t make anything easy for themselves. The house occupies what was a scrappy verge at the end of a low-rise block of council housing, a patch of grass that had become the neighbourhood dog toilet. Having bought the site from the council at auction, without planning permission, they set about designing a building that would mediate between its neighbours: postwar housing on one side, a Victorian terrace on the other, and a multistorey car park across the street, whose panels of perforated brick provided some inspiration. Echoes of the nearby railway viaducts are also evident in the house’s deep arched entrances at the front and rear, their weighty barrel vaults bringing a sense of infrastructural heft. “We want it to last for at least a hundred years,” says Surman.
Inside, it feels like an update of the Victorian terrace, with rooms leading from one to the next. Exposed breeze-block walls (with 75% recycled content) have been smoothed over with a rough coat of lime plaster, so you can still see the joints, while the living room floor is made of chunky end-grain timber, like a giant butcher’s block. It looks expensive, but was cleverly made of leftovers from the larch joists, just as the front path was made with brick offcuts from the facade. The exterior walls’ beguiling dissolving effect was created by cutting alternate bricks back by 5mm every five courses – a precision job for which the duo employed professional bricklayers.
Bespoke fittings have been elegantly created on a budget: from a shelving system made using standard aluminium extrusions to kitchen cupboards of green-stained MDF, a crafty substitute for pricier Valchromat. A bold abstract painting and chunky ceramic amphora by Weston’s mother, the artist Nicolette Ismay, add to the handcrafted air of the place. The neutral interiors are complemented by vintage lamps from eBay, mid-century furniture – an Ercol stacking chair, bought secondhand from a local store, and a poppy red Eames DSR chair from Vitra – and a colourful Moroccan rug from Etsy. There are a few luxe touches, too, like the solid brass doorknobs, hand-turned to the architects’ design, and left raw to patinate over time.
From the hall, a sculptural wooden staircase winds its way up through the house, its visible underside sprayed with lime plaster for fire-proofing and with a pleasingly splattered effect. It forms a nice lumpy contrast against the walls, which transition from the rough-coated blockwork to a smooth polished plaster finish on the second floor. A bright blue steel balustrade, welded by a local metalworker, adds a welcome zing of colour, while a downstairs loo is tucked below, along with storage beneath a trapdoor. “We’ve both lived on boats,” says Weston, “so we’re used to making the most of every little space.”
Everywhere, humble materials and fixtures have been elevated with simple techniques. The plywood doors of a built-in wardrobe are stained with a deep natural indigo dye, giving them an inky shimmer. An electric hoist, used during the building work to haul materials up and down, has been left dangling in the middle of the stairwell as a fun dumb waiter for the roof terrace.
The roof is a real highlight, accessed through a quirky sliding hatch, which is covered in thick cork for thermal insulation, and can be left open to ventilate the house in summer, or closed to form a handy table. In a wonderfully surreal move, you emerge from the hatch into a greenhouse – bought off the shelf – that serves as a magical winter garden and a handy place for drying laundry.
A row of solar panels cover one side of the roof, while a deep planting area runs around the edge of the deck, allowing for decent-size trees, shrubs and climbers – from west Himalayan birch trees to clumps of Russian sage and clouds of violet cosmos – eventually planned to engulf most of the facade. “It’s my favourite room in the house,” says Surman, “hovering above the chaos of Peckham down below.”
