Bright new day for dark London home
Architects harness power of light, colour to give Victorian sense of space
Light and colour were the natural solutions to transform a small, dark home in London, England.
So R2 Studio Architects tackled the renovation of Kennington House — now a stunning, 1,750-square-foot Victorian home — by using colour, and lots of it. As well, they introduced skylights and a thirdfloor loft addition to create a modern, energy-efficient residence that also has a comfortable airy feel.
The new, open-plan ground floor has a lounge, dining area, kitchen and small work station. The second floor has three bedrooms and a family bathroom, while the third-floor loft-extension has two more bedrooms and a bathroom — the rear bedroom with a panoramic window overlooking London’s skyline.
Aseamless bright rubber floor runs through the entire house. Two colourful staircases link the levels. Materials used in Kennington House include painted MDF, plywood, plasterboard and Formica. The home was retrofitted with insulation, decreasing heat loss by 90 per cent. It took a year-and-a-half to design and build, and was completed in 2016.
Frederik Rissom, with London’s R2 Studio Architects Ltd., answers a few questions about Kennington House:
Why so much colour? Initially this wasn’t going to be a colourful project. The owners weren’t keen on the “feature wall” approach — very trendy in London at the moment — where you paint just one wall in a colour from a tasteful range of safe colours. The idea, initially, was to use colour for the builtin furniture and/or on the floor.
As the design of the staircase evolved towards something very contemporary, we started experimenting with a range of flooring and panelling colours, turning the staircase inside out — almost like a piece of furniture itself. The stairs lend themselves to this as you’re likely to have clashes with furniture, for instance. The overall scheme evolved from there, working with a lot of samples, visualizations, sketches. It’s a true reflection of an intense and close collaboration between client and architect.
Tell us about the colours. The master bedroom is quiet in shades of grey. The children’s bedroom floor colours were chosen with the children. We then complemented those with strong colours using a mix of more neutral chromatics and strong accent colours. The top floor is generally lighter, again with stronger accent colours popping up here or there.
For choice of colours and matching existing colours, it’s difficult to beat the NC system: a colour system developed in Sweden, based on the human perception of colour rather than the mixing of pre-defined pigments.
For example, the human eye can differentiate between a lot more greens than blues, so the NCS colour wheel also includes green as a fourth primary colour.
How did you make the home seem airier and bigger? We insulated the entire house from the inside, which made the internal window reveals really deep — so we have given the window reveals a very minimal edge detail. As a result, the light that often comes in at an angle gets reflected around the room generously. One main contributor to the increased daylight was to insert an oversized sky- light above the stair, through which a lot of daylight filters down to the middle floor. This way we managed to get daylight into the centre of the building which would otherwise have been quite dark.
We’ve seen a lot of white in home decor over the past 30 years. Is the use of more colour the decor of the future? I would certainly love to see more colour in everyday life. Used right, colour can transform a space. It can mute a bright space, make a dark corner glow, guide the user around a space, help create order in a busy space or jazz up a boring space … it all depends on how you apply it.