Phillimore
Gardens
Location | Kensington, London
Scale | 3,900 sq.ft.
Bed / bath | 6 / 4
Completed | 2023
This is a house that had run out of room in every direction the law allowed. It sits within the Kensington Conservation Area, on an estate known for holding the line against change. We found the space anyway, downwards, and rebuilt the house around it. What was a handsome but tired townhouse is now a home with a garden that climbs, a lower ground floor that surprises everyone who walks into it, and rooms upstairs that finally feel like themselves again.
| THE BRIEF |
A beautiful house at a wonderful address, poorly kept.
Phillimore Gardens is one of London's most sought after addresses, and the house had the bones to match it. But it had been badly looked after. The rear carried dated, unattractive extensions, and the interior was jumbled, unmodernised in places and, in others, stripped of its character without sympathy. The brief was an opportunity to look at the whole house again, and to undertake a significant upgrade in its use, its infrastructure and its design quality.
| WE DUG INSTEAD |
If the house cannot grow outwards, send it down.
Excavating the lower ground gave us close to four metres of ceiling height, and with it a kitchen that opens straight onto the garden. The move bought volume without taking an inch of outdoor space. Landscaped steps then climb back to the original garden level, where a fireplace anchors a seating area at the far end. The garden was gained in section, not in area.
| LET THE LIGHT TALK |
Architecture shaped around a ceiling you would never expect in a house like this.
By excavating downwards we reached a ceiling close to four metres, and shaped the whole room around it. That kind of volume is not what a Kensington lower ground usually offers, and stepping into it is genuinely transformative. Full height Crittall doors bring the garden and sky inside, while a restrained palette of raw materials and polished concrete keeps everything quiet. Nothing competes, so the space and the light are left to speak.
| UPSTAIRS, ROOMS AGAIN |
The house stops reaching outwards and starts settling in.
Above the garden level, the logic reverses. Rooms are no longer routes to somewhere else, they are destinations in their own right, and the work turns from spatial to restorative. Moulded plaster, panelling and a calm, quiet palette bring the character back rather than invent it. Texture and craft carry the through line downstairs to up, so the house reads as one house even as it changes its mind.
| A SUITE APART |
Somewhere the house lets you stop.
The principal suite is positioned to stand slightly away from the rhythm of family life. It is not a bedroom with extras attached. It is a sequence, arrived at rather than entered, designed so that closing one door is enough to leave the rest of the house behind. The one room in the house designed to be left alone.
