Hayhurst and Co Carves a 7.8-Metre Void Into 1970s Hampstead House

By Daniel Okafor

Hayhurst and Co has cut a 7.8-metre triple-height void through Hampstead Town House, a skinny five-storey London home designed in 1970 by architects Igal Yawetz and Howard Radley. The studio kept the brick exterior intact. Everything inside got rethought.

The London studio renewed the mortar between the original bricks and added a small timber extension at roof level, echoing the existing timber window frames. The restraint was deliberate.

"The project was about a faithful modernist restoration on the outside, but it was inside where the architectural opportunity lay," co-founder Nick Hayhurst told Dezeen.

What changed inside?

The architects removed sections of the existing floor plates (the horizontal slabs forming each storey) to create the void, which now links the lower ground, ground and first floors in one continuous sequence of spaces.

The lower ground floor tells the sharpest before-and-after story. It was a garage with a two-metre ceiling. It is now a double-height dining room, with the kitchen sitting three steps further down at the front of the house.

The dining room is twice as tall as it is wide. A folded timber ceiling and an angled mirrored wall bounce daylight and views of the surrounding trees back into the room. Hayhurst said the mirror was "unashamedly inspired" by Adolf Loos' American Bar in Vienna, that famous pocket-sized moment of 1908 spatial theatre.

The folded ceiling does double duty. Its recessed sections translate the curve of the house's circular stairwell into flat timber and help dampen sound in the tall room.

How do five staircases fit in one narrow house?

The original circular stairwell was insulated and lined with vertical timber, with a new curved landing following its geometry as it rises to the bedrooms. The studio then designed four more stair types around it:

• A solid marble stair linking entrance to dining room
• Solid timber steps between kitchen and dining space
• A lighter staircase rising through the central void, letting daylight pass between levels
• An enclosed timber staircase up to the roof terrace

The upper levels stack conventionally: living room on the first floor, main bedroom on the second, two further bedrooms and a bathroom on the third.

Interiors combine cherry timber cladding, reclaimed parquet, walnut, marble and oak, with one-off furniture pieces designed alongside the cabinetry makers. Original window handles stayed. Tiles from the former sunken bathroom were reused to make a new handbasin on the ground floor.

"We like the idea of being material hacks wherever possible," Hayhurst said.

Is this a green retrofit too?

Fairly thoroughly. The project introduced an air-source heat pump, underfloor heating, internal insulation and oak-framed double glazing. New windows match the proportions of the original fenestration; the soffits (the underside surfaces of the ceilings and overhangs) were insulated and rendered in pink.

Hayhurst and Co was founded in London in 2004 by Nick Hayhurst and Jonathan Nicholls, and works across homes, schools and cultural projects with a focus on materiality and sustainability. Previous work featured by Dezeen includes Green House, a low-energy family home conceived as a domestic-scale greenhouse, and Edith Neville Primary School, wrapped in a filigree screen of white aluminium mesh.

The Hampstead project shows the studio's formula at its most concentrated: conservation outside, invention inside, and old materials quietly recycled in between. Photography is by Kilian O'Sullivan.