Studio Ben Allen exceeded the limits of off-site fabrication with the project to expand a Victorian house in Haringey, a residential neighbourhood in the northern part of London. The brief to expand the kitchen and insert two new bathrooms, one on the ground floor, led the architects to rethink the rear portion of the house. Enclosing part of the garden and building a new façade, for which they tested out the use of prefabricated pigmented concrete as a structural material and as a decorative element.

“Fabrication off site,” reveals the firm, “is not applied to small-scale interventions, but here we applied it for the assembly of the columns and green load-bearing pillars that frame the new salmon-coloured portion that screens the bathrooms, greatly reducing the duration of the intervention: the frame and the walls of the extension were erected in just three days”. The use of pigmented concrete was maintained even inside, defining the kitchen counters, the floors of the new spaces, the staircase with the balustrade and the first floor bathroom, completely green and conceived as a hammam with a bathtub at the end and a central open shower.

The new layout, which allowed them to gain 20 square metres, put all the emphasis on the double-height space of the kitchen. Visually connected to the upper walkway, it gets light from a barrel vault transformed into a skylight. All the decorative motifs – the lunettes of the façade and the carving of the internal balustrade – were industrially made with CNC machines and reinterpret, in a contemporary key, the decorations that embellished nineteenth-century British terraced houses.

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