Act in haste, repent at leisure, they say, but in the case of architect
Mouzhan Majidi, five years of "leisure" enabled him to turn round a house
that had been bought in haste, and transform it into an admirable family
home.
Seven years ago, when returning from Hong Kong with a pregnant wife and a
one-year-old baby, Majidi, a senior partner with Battersea-based Foster &
Partners, was under pressure to find a home quickly so that his family could
move in immediately. He had left London as a bachelor in the early Nineties
to head up his firm's development of the new airport in Hong Kong, and was
returning to London a family man.
"I didn't want to buy a house that needed building work or decorating," he
says. "We had to make a home instantly, so we bought a new-build,
four-bedroom house in a cul-de-sac in Surbiton." Not an architectural icon,
true, but a practical solution, and within easy reach of his Battersea
office and Heathrow airport.
The family settled in and the years passed, son Nima and daughter Nika started
at local schools and built up a wide group of friends and playmates, but
soon Majidi and his wife, mechanical engineer Faranak, began to feel that
with the children growing, they needed more space.
"We thought about moving but didn't want to leave the area," says Majidi.
"So we looked around at what we had, and realised that there was a lot of
garden and a wasted section that slopes down to a railway embankment." He
began to draw up plans for an extension, but readily admits that he is his
own worst client. "The basic idea came easily," he says, "but it took two
years of tweaking and amending to get it to a point where I was ready to
start." This "leisure" time enabled him to study the path of the sun and the
direction of light at the back of the house through a whole year. "It
allowed me to plan the extension so that we make full use of the natural
light, and even in winter when the light is low it penetrates into the
kitchen, which is in the centre of the house". Because of its proximity to
the railway track, the long side wall of the extension was designed to be
solid and windowless, but Majidi compensated for this by including extra
roof lights in the upper rooms.
The area of garden by the railway embankment was partially filled and levelled
so that building work could start in January 2005, and it was completed in
April the following year. "We didn't change the street-facing façade at all,
and you don't see the extension until you are actually in the house," says
Majidi. "The planners wanted the external material to be the same, so the
outer wall facing the railway track is clad in bricks that match the rest of
the house, and they also insisted on a similar pitched roof, but that gave
us an advantage: it added volume to the new rooms." Within the pitched roof
of the extension, Majidi created a stepped, three-level configuration. The
ground floor contains the kitchen and dining area with a triple-height
living room. Above the kitchen is a double-height study and the children's
single-height bedrooms with interconnecting bathroom. Above Nika's bedroom
and the adjacent bathroom is the third-floor playroom.
The playroom, with its colourful Sinclair Till wool kilim and sloping wall of
windows, is ideal for the children and their friends. And although the head
height is restricted at the sides, there is adequate standing height in the
centre for visiting adults. The lower, side sections are used for lounging
on floor cushions, stacking games and storing boxes of Lego and toys.
Majidi's experience in the building of Hong Kong's airport, and his current
project, an even bigger airport in Bejiing, had an impact on the work he
carried out at home. Firstly, the two curtain walls of glass in the
extension were constructed by Structura, a company he had worked with
professionally, but which, conveniently, also happened to be based in nearby
Chessington. The glass used on the internal walls and roof lights,
meanwhile, is Frit glass, also found in a number of the large-scale
commercial buildings with which Majidi has been involved.
"Frit glass is sprayed with a fine coating of ceramic spots which are fired
and sealed on to the glass," explains Majidi. "On the roof panels, this
diffuses direct sunlight and prevents glare, and on the internal walls the
spots are graduated so that the glass is opaque at the bottom, giving total
privacy, but at the top the spots are less densely applied so they allow
someone in the room to see out and for daylight to shine in."
Once plans for the structure of the extension were finalised, the couple
concentrated on the interiors. "We chose a dark wenge wood for the ground
floor and took it through into the hall of the original house, so that there
is continuity between the two sections," says Majidi. "The wenge is from a
sustainable source and purchased through Listone Giordano, who also supplied
the oak for the upper floors. We went for a lighter wood upstairs because we
wanted to keep it bright, whereas on the ground floor, with all the white
and glass walls, we felt that the scheme needed a dark, grounding colour."
After some discussion it was agreed that wenge wood would also be used for
the surface of the island unit in the kitchen. "The units in the kitchen are
from the Setasil range by Boffi from Alternative Plans (the showroom is near
the office), but they also had a sleek minimal style that suited this room.
We avoided putting units on the wall because, as it is part of an open-plan
living area, we didn't want the kitchen to look too obvious, and it is also
almost the first thing you see as you walk in to the entrance hall.
"Permasteelisa, the company who built the staircase, specially sourced the
wenge used for the step, shelves and island unit worktop from Denmark,"
Majidi continues. "In fact, they bought a single tree from which they cut
all the wood we needed, so we have an interesting range of hues and grains
which gives the worktop a table-like quality." There is also a separate
walk-in utility room, which means that bulky washing and drying machines are
excluded from the kitchen layout.
As the work on the new part of the house was drawing to completion, the
builders moved in to the original house and gutted it, taking out the old
ground-floor kitchen and reconfiguring it into a family room. The original
plaster walls in the hall were demolished and replaced with Frit glass
panels, tying in with the extensive use of glass in the new section, and the
main bathroom was redesigned to incorporate a double-ended Flamina bath,
which is similar in style to the slightly smaller, Foster-designed Duravit
bath found in the bathroom between Nima and Nika's new bedrooms.
And are client and architect pleased with the result? "It's a great family
space," says Majidi. "We are always in view of each other, so if the
children are playing on the top floor, I'm working in the study below and
Faranak is on the ground floor, we can all see and hear each other; no one
is locked away behind solid walls. It has totally transformed the original
building; the neighbours have been round and can't believe it's the same
place; some of them even feel disorientated." So it seems an impetuous
purchase isn't always a bad thing.
www.sinclairtill.co.uk;
www.alternative-plans.co.uk;
www.listonegiordano.com
