Teddington Folly

Extension and refurbishment of a house in Teddington, London. 2016

Featured on the Architecture Today website in 2017 and Apollo magazine in 2020

This locally listed Victorian terraced cottage was completely refurbished and extended to the rear with a folly-like addition. The ground floor has been remodelled to provide rooms in enfilade with an intimate library to the front, a pantry, kitchen, internal courtyard and dining room and finally the new garden room with views to the long, narrow garden.

The extension presents itself to the garden as a temple front; two doric columns are paired with doric pilasters which are suggested by protruding bricks, and an entablature is formed by precast concrete lintels: a folly within its bucolic setting. The pyramid roof is clad with cedar shingles and has a polished plaster ceiling internally.

A brick chimney houses the stove and divides the garden room from the dining room. It features a sculpture niche which was cast by us in-house. We designed the kitchen to read as a series of free-standing benches and cupboards and work surfaces are honed slate and stainless steel.

A new en-suite bathroom at first floor is a calm space with a grey Saint Laurent marble floor and a view over the shingle roof to the garden.

[This project] set out to capture that gentle classical atmosphere and now that the foliage has grown up is succeeding very well in doing so. It’s not possible to bring off this sort of thing – and the detailing is excellent – without historical knowledge: you have to look at and know what our historical predecessors have done and to learn directly from it. I like the way that the exposed brickwork continues on inside the house in the form of a rustic-looking fireplace, so you have exactly that sense of the perfected simple-life cottage the Regency writers and architects very nicely set against a modern sense of what a sculptural brick fireplace should be like.

Excerpt from lecture “The 20th Century House – Future Trends “ by Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin of Cambridge University for the 20th Century Society.