Thin end of the wedge

05 April 2007

I’m certain it wasn’t in the architects’ conscious minds while struggling with this narrow and awkward site, but the main impact of the simple house they have produced in Elgin Avenue is an emotional one: the kind of emotion that comes from moving through small dark space, emerging into wide light spaces, taking devious routes, delving into cave spaces. The last thing one might expect from a very little house in west London is an essay in the essence of picturesque architecture, but here it seems to be.

The Sliver House (its owner prefers to call it the Glass House) has been built on the site of a single-storey wine vault that served the adjacent pub. From the street it looks impossibly small, with a 3m frontage and 8m height. It looks even smaller because of its wide and high neighbours, all brick, terracotta, stucco and tall sash windows: those great stalwarts of Victorian life, the terraced and the public house.

Generous roof terrace

So the first surprise comes when you go in to find the ground floor opening up away from you in a big wedge of a room, widening to 6m. This is the general living room/entrance hall, which ends in a folding-glass wall, with a generous 3m-wide roof terrace beyond. The room feels bigger than the small introduction would suggest, and bigger still because the terrace ends not with a panorama, but with a brick wall. You get the benefit of light without the dreariness of gazing out at a particularly vile 1930s apartment building and the container yard of Portakabins that is the back of the local school.

Going into the basement, one edges down a narrow confining staircase — this is minimal in the regulatory sense — and is confronted at the bottom with a kind of spatial inversion: you arrive not at the beginning of the room, but at its centre. The room is the same shape and size as the one above, but instead of two walls of window, there are no windows at all. Yet there is light. It comes from above, from two broad slabs of glass buried in the roof terrace above. This alternation — small space-big space-inverted space — goes on throughout the house. And you are aware of its front and centre position because the stuff of the house is so essentially modest. Our attention isn’t being called to anything more lavish than a rather nicely detailed facade, a fragment of curtain walling with obscured glass that masks the ground and bedroom floors above. You could argue that there isn’t much room for anything but modesty. That is probably true. The owner, living here with his wife and two daughters, is not a splashy man and he likes white paint. It can be a real pain seeing white paint and glass in every “sharp” gallery and Apple showroom in the western world, but here you feel the choice has made the house’s principal virtue stand out in relief.

Upstairs things are just as pragmatic. The staircase launches itself across the house, dividing the first floor into two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. Bathtub? Forget it. But the shower is unexpectedly large, and the route to it is a bit twisty. On plan, the top floor looks as if there might be some constructivist dynamic stuff going on — staircase slashing across the room — but you get there and you just don’t notice it. You notice that the stair is one of those in-the-thickness-of-the-castle-wall affairs, and when you emerge from it, that bedroom seems pretty big. Even more, a generous bathroom is attached, with a neatly shoehorned shower — there’s even a bathtub!

Party wall constraints

You might expect that the plan would be kept full-footprint, floor-to-floor, all the way up, but this was impossible: the party wall with the pub has a number of windows in it that the plan steps back to avoid. The only constant is in fact that curtain wall.

This house looks like a simple proposition, and it is. The rules are few but severe, and the result is a proposition pushed to extremes. In this case the proposition, on reduced rations, survives.

One or two problems, yes, there are. The planners, it would seem, gave permission, but their feet chilled. They had reservations and appended 20 pages of conditions to their approval. Most disruptive was their insistence that the back wall of the house — an existing two storeys of stock brick — remain untouched. So where you might expect pipes to poke neatly through what is after all a back yard wall, in fact they have to wander about awkwardly within the house and finally pop over the parapet. These are minor points — the house is relaxed enough to absorb it.

So what we have here is another fraction of the indeterminable story of fragmentation; a site that is a spatial splinter, a chasm between the certainties of middle-class Victorian London. The constraints are hard, technical and spatial, there isn’t a lot of room to play around — get that space in! And almost (almost) incidentally, the house’s steady dedication to getting the job done throws off a rather delightful wake in the form of highly contrasting spatial values, expressed in light and volume alone.

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