So far, so straightforward. Even the kitchen units are plain, functionalist items, and there are simple eyeball lamps in the ceiling. Though there are also some tricksy touches in such things as the joinery details and the fact that there are rather more columns than you would normally expect in such a relatively narrow space. The downstairs floor is costly hardwood parquet - a rare luxury on this budget - while the rest of the house is floored in mustard-yellow carpet. There are other colours - reds, pinks, blues and blue-greens. More colours than you would find in a modernist interior. And this is not a modernist interior, despite Griffiths’ tongue-in-cheek claim to the contrary, because it is a house conceived as a series of rooms, with real doors and sometimes several of them per room. Not for this family the open-plan loft aesthetic.
The staircase wraps round the end of the dining area, pausing at a sit-out space on the first landing. Although it is a small nook, with a window seat set into the thickness of the façade and that little gallery overlooking the space below, it is a powerful focus for the whole house. Daughter Lily apparently colonized it immediately. Upstairs, she gets a room with built-in bed accessed by pink steps, and an internal balcony looking down to the room below. A connecting door here leads, somewhat unexpectedly, straight into Lynn’s studio behind with its long built-in tables and rolls and drawings and computers: all thoroughly professional and resolutely undomestic.
Upstairs again, and you’re into the main bedroom behind that grid of 18 windows (“We may have to get a lot of very tiny, expensive blinds for all those,” Griffiths laments). It has two doors into it, on the grounds that it can be subdivided later. So making more compartments. With all the doors and cupboards and lookout points in this house, the potential for high-speed farce is considerable. Griffiths, as always, has a phrase for it. Remembering the modernist architect Adolf Loos, who coined the slogan “ornament is crime”, he describes the house as “Adolf Loos meets South Park. It’s meant to have a kind of innocence.”
One of the many ingenuities of the place is that you can be in the house and be completely unaware of the work of the landscape studio at the back, or of the little rented studio flat upstairs - both of which have their own street entrance and separate staircase. All in all, it is one of the most intelligent, not to say mischievous, new houses that I have seen for some time. A house designed by an architect for an architect, that works beautifully, breaks rules, is low cost, defiantly unmodish and refuses to take itself too seriously? You don’t get many of those to the pound.
FAT Architects: tel 020 7251 6735. www.fat.co.uk
