An apartment extended into the garden and beyond
Our clients lived in a ground-floor apartment in Maida Vale, with a generous rear garden, but the existing layout turned its back on this asset. The kitchen occupied the prime garden-facing location, while the living spaces were inward-looking and disconnected. The flat had potential, but its plan reflected an outdated approach to urban living.
The brief was simple but transformative: create a more sociable, open-plan home with a direct connection to the garden, introduce a second bedroom, and rethink how daylight, privacy, and openness could coexist in a modest footprint.
Winner - AJ Robin Ellis Small Projects Award
We began by shifting the kitchen away from the rear and inserting a new dining space between the entrance and garden. This allowed us to shorten the corridor and widen the plan gradually, culminating in a full-width rear extension to house the new living room.
Rather than treat the extension as an add-on, we conceived it as a continuation, drawing out the floor, walls, and ceiling of the original apartment to form a new, extruded volume. Large glazed sliding-folding doors open the space completely to the garden, while the timber floor extends beyond the building line, visually blurring the threshold between inside and out.
An external courtyard, caught between old and new, becomes a transitional zone, a pocket of space where the rhythms of the home and the garden meet. The result is a plan that flows intuitively, layered with views, light and a subtle choreography of public and private.
The apartment now feels larger, lighter and more fluid, transformed not by size alone, but by rethinking the relationship between interior and exterior. What was once enclosed and fragmented is now a quiet, open extension of the garden itself.