All this is strange enough, but there is more, not least the trick Griffiths has played with perspective. You’re really not at all sure how large the windows are, or why they are placed quite the way they are. The 18 windows, in three rows, of the “office-block” upper floor, for instance, are thoroughly disorientating. You think there must be many rooms up there. In fact there is just one room - the main bedroom - with lots of very small windows.
The plan was ambitious: to design a house that could not only accommodate, Sean, his partner Lynn Kinnear (a landscape architect) and their five-year-old daughter Lily, but which would also be a studio, with separate entrance, for Lynn and her assistants (so saving the family the equivalent of a Clerkenwell office rent, which is steep these days). The house had to be flexible enough for future changes, with rooms capable of being divided. Finally, to help the finances stack up, a self-contained flat to rent out was added to the mix. What with the saved rent and the gained rent, this made the project affordable. Because this is anything but an indulgent piece of architecture by moneyed fashionistas. The house has to work harder than most.
The plot of land - a former metalworkers’ yard that had once housed a dairy - cost £65,000 three years ago. The total building costs are around £300,000. In London, this is about as cheap as it is possible to build any bespoke house, let alone one as ambitious as this with lettable parts.
It all had to be achieved on a tiny little site in a side street just off the Hackney Road. It’s the fact that it has been done with no sense of being squeezed, and on a low budget, that tells you there is a lot more to Griffiths’ architecture than the wittily provocative website that FAT presents to the world. Moreover, despite their manifesto statements, there is something a bit dualistic happening here. Griffiths voiced this before I first went to see the house as it was being completed at the start of the year. “The interior’s turning out interesting,” he said. “It’s getting kind of modernist”.
