Cockroaches and beetles in abundance, asbestos, walls rotted and corroded by humidity and even the scars of more than one house fire: the house you see here, located in the area of Waltham Forest, London. In a word, it was an uninhabitable, unhealthy place. But this did not scare the architects of Mike Tuck Studiowho won that lost cause, transforming it into a welcoming and bright one family residence. With an added merit: they succeeded by giving up steel and thus reducing the carbon footprint, a sustainable choice pursued with stubborn ingenuity, even if more expensive and complex.
To begin with, it was necessary to strengthen the unsafe structure. THE old brick walls they couldn’t stand, but the designers didn’t just demolish them. Instead, they took them apart brick by brick, and then rebuilt them, using the same materials, so they didn’t end up in landfill. The new structure therefore features brick walls, but lighter, accompanied by a rear wooden frame.
This allowed the side to be opened to introduce an extension supported by a simple wooden truss, as opposed to the usual steel construction method. The rest of the recovered bricks make up the new patio, while the original curved roof is left drilling from skylights to let in the glow. “We believe what is remarkable about this project is that we have achieved the same quality and quantity of space that usually requires a lot of steel,” explains the creative team.
And in fact, here they find their place in the extension an open-plan kitchen and a dining area more suited to family life, made of natural materials and full of light. The newfound energy of the house is also expressed through colour, with snippets of blue and green to disturb the minimal frankness of the whole. Thus, without steel but with a great desire to experiment, the old London ruin has come back to life, fully deserving the name with which it now identifies itself: At Mended Housea house mended, healed, saved.
www.miketuck.co.uk
Elisa Zagaria is an author who has transformed her greatest passion into a job: researching and inventing stories. What she talks about for Elle Decor, as a freelance collaborator, features dream homes, personalities, events and symbolic places of our time. And then there are other stories, in the form of novels and especially screenplays, that she writes for television, waiting to become rich enough to be able to buy one of those dream houses.
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