In this beautiful, detached house, near Hampstead, our client wanted to create a more enjoyable experience for the ir kitchen, that was positioned in the basement floor. The rear garden was at the level of the ground floor, and to bring light in the basement a small rear courtyard excavated into the garden.

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Our brief was to redesign the basement completely, with a bespoke new kitchen and adding a dining space by extending on the rear garden, excavating further into the garden, redesigning also the relationship between the property and its garden.

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The roof of the new basement extension would create also much more comfortable access from the ground floor rear French door to the garden.

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Once the internal layout was agreed upon, we submitted a Pre-Application to the Local Authority the Camden Council, to start a dialogue about the project. This was an important step before going with the Planning Permission, because of some characteristics of the site, firstly for being in a conservation area, secondly, the property adjacent is a Chapel which was recently been converted to flat and with which our design should have been sympathetic in terms of materials and privacy.

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With the planning permission, a basement impact Assessment report, a Flood risk assessment,  ana an Arboricultural impact analysis was prepared, and we included in our design mitigation measures to avoid

damages to the root of the existing oak in the garden while excavating the garden to extend the basement.

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One of the features of the project was surely the cladding design, we're using a computer-generated pattern we wrapped the new extension in a graphite-colour cladding panelling, that would highlight the modern addition in contrast with the existing property in facing bricks and stucco white inserts.

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The graphite cladding would also create a dialogue  with the natural slate rooftiles of the chapel, whilst the modern pattern would create a dynamic surface.

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The connection between the new basement rear extension and the exiting house was created by using a structural glass platform that at the roof level would become a walk-on platform to be used from the living room to access the garden, while doubling as rooflight to the basement and bringing a generous quantity of light to it.

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The cladding was executed by a specialised contractor in a package with the waterproofing, which we directed separately from the main contractor, and we co-coordinated our design with their construction and fixing details from drawings to on-site installation.

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For this project we oversaw the contract administration and on-site assistance to the contractors including ad-hoc drawings and 3D images to show the required information.