Glass act: gloomy Victorian home transformed by a skylight and soaring glass door nearly three storeys high

A giant sash window and a sculptural staircase were the keys to turning a dark Victorian terrace house into a bright, spacious modern home for a young family in Bayswater.
Philippa Stockley12 March 2020

They are the bread and butter of our city yet traditional Victorian terrace houses, tall, narrow, deep and dark, can present a problem. Most of us want space and light but these houses have rooms stacked on top of each other, dingy basements and gloomy cores.

Luckily, it’s a challenge architects rise to. In spring 2016, David Tigg got a call from a young family who had just bought a five-storey 1880 house in a white stucco Bayswater terrace.

Brought up locally, Tigg, of award-winning Tigg+Coll Architects, knows these terraces well, and this one ran true to form. On five floors but only 2,100sq ft, it was narrow and deep.

A space-hogging staircase took up the middle, with half-landings gobbling more room. At the back a small bathroom extension had been bodged on, then another storey added. The original butterfly roof had been filled in to make a fifth floor.

The white frontage had lost a fine canopy with fretwork supports, which the neighbouring house still retained. Long tenanted, the building was tired, the garden asleep.

The couple, who had two small children, wanted a spacious, light family home to set off their art collection. The jumbled array of small rooms did nothing for them, while the half-basement was only six-and-a-half feet high. They liked Eastern style, so lightness, screens and a simple palette appealed.

Inside the once gloomy Victorian terrace now full of light

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The project

Tigg suggested demolishing the additions at the back and putting a three-storey extension across with a soaring glass door, two-and-a-half storeys high, to fill the indoors with natural light: a modern French window with two big vertical panes. The new extension would allow a double-height space.

They would also add two feet of extra headroom by excavating. To make all this structurally viable, the architects would need to gut the insides and fit a steel endo-skeleton for support.

To maximise the space they would move and simplify the staircase, replacing the half-turns with straight runs and pushing it towards the back, lit by a skylight. This staircase would be the key to unlocking the space, and a focal point all the way up.

Maximising space: staircase half-landings were lost and a skylight installed drama: the house now has an open-plan interior
Andy Matthews

However, planners said the giant French window was out of character in a conservation area of sash windows with horizontal lines.

The architects responded with the same huge opening, but holding a sash window of three large panes. Because the panes are counterweighted, as the bottom one soars up, the top one slides down, and the window can be operated with one finger. It passed.

Work began in early 2017 and took until the following summer. Everyone lost count of the skips. When the basement had been dug and the back of the house removed, it looked more like an open-air swimming pool than a house.

The pay-off

The pigmy basement is now one vast bright room with polished concrete floors and a Bulthaup kitchen, leading to a terrace of bespoke concrete tiles matching the floor inside.

What it cost

 Similar projects would cost £250-£450 per square foot​

The new steel-and-oak folded staircase soars through the house, a sculptural statement that also occupies less space and lets light permeate. It looks simple, but this new cantilevered staircase of 8mm mild steel topped with pale oiled oak is anything but.

An oak balustrade screen runs alongside from basement to attic, light shimmying between its square-cut bars. The slatted balustrade appears to be wood, yet every fourth or fifth bar has a steel core for strength.

The library snug at one end of the drawing room has graceful, curved plaster walls
Andy Matthews

Four bedrooms and four bathrooms with raised-stipple grey tiles add to the overall sophisticated palette. Cornices have vanished and shadow gaps mark where skirtings once ran.

Super-tall doors are finished in oak, and a library snug at one end of the drawing room has graceful, curved plaster walls.

Getting a perfect finish on the body of an old brick Victorian building is a bit like an entire body lift, where there can be no evidence of nips and tucks. Done right, it shows what time, patience and money can achieve.

And as Tigg explains, it’s major structural works that pile on pounds, while beautiful finishes are only a tiny part of the whole.

But it is that amazing window that clinches it — and before you ask, yes, you can get a blind that big

Get the look

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