But around the popular Columbia Road flower market, the advance guard of gentrifiers is obtaining a foothold. Tucked away almost invisibly, you will find this tiny but highly imaginative house, converted from an old rag trade factory.

The architect is Matthew Priestman, his client an advertising "creative". But although Priestman has done much costlier homes in posh parts of town, and his client is in a famously ostentatious business, this little home is low-cost and - mostly - understated.

All right, so placing a free-standing bath, unenclosed, just off the top of the stairs is not the work of shrinking violets. Particularly when the bath in question is moulded from a single piece of bubbly but distinctly transparent cast glass, and placed on what would normally be the stair landing, to save space. Indeed, the only private room in the whole house is the lavatory.

But then, it's a bachelor pad, and although there is a guest "bedroom" - on a platform up a ladder right under the apex of the roof - this house does not have to do any of the things that a family home does. In that respect, it's more like a loft apartment. It just happens to be on the ground and a great deal more interesting than the average loft.

The building is set sideways-on to the road, overlooking a small courtyard behind a high wall with big wooden gates in it. The courtyard is conceived as an outdoor room and opens up from the house via a full-length sliding glass wall - the whole of the first floor is supported on one long steel beam to allow this shop-window-sized aperture.