Polysmiths Turns a Peckham Terrace Into Pine House, a Machine for Light

Polysmiths has completed Pine House, a renovation of a Victorian terraced home in Peckham, south London, designed around what founder Charles Wu calls "designing light itself as the primary material."

The local architecture studio tackled what Wu described as the "well-known limitations" of London's ubiquitous Victorian terraces. "The problems of the Victorian terrace typology became the generative brief: long, narrow proportions, a compressed rear extension, and poor daylight penetration," Wu told Dezeen.

"The project is built around designing light itself as the primary material, to reinterpret the terrace into an open, generous home," he added.

The boldest move is structural. Rather than adding a conventional rear extension or side-return, Polysmiths removed a mid-floor over the rear outrigger to create a double-height void at the centre of the house. South-facing light from the upper level now falls through to the kitchen and living room below.

A single axis organises the ground floor. It runs from a reception room with a large bay window at the front to an angular glazed garden room at the rear, sheltered by timber slats. Between the two, the central kitchen and dining area sits at the base of the new void, lit by a row of windows to the south and overlooked by a small mezzanine library to the north.

The rear elevation faces south-east. Wu's team treated this as an opportunity, angling the garden room glazing further south to soften the corner and pull in more light.

Shadow as a design tool

"The guiding principle is that light needs shadow to exist," Wu said. "Textures and shadows are what give a space its atmosphere."

The material palette serves that principle. Interior walls were stripped to brick and given only a thin lime-plaster wash. "Creating a textured surface that catches changing shadow through the day," Wu explained. Solid Radiata Pine boards line the main living spaces, chosen for what he called "a warm, honey-toned glow."

The garden room takes the opposite tack. It is lined in dark expanded cork boards, "chosen so southern sunlight would create strong texture and shadow contrast," Wu said. Cork also covers the ceilings, while timber-lined walls and storage surround the kitchen.

On the first and second floors, four bedrooms and two bathrooms are organised around lime-washed brick walls, plastered surfaces, timber floors and tiled bathrooms.

Facing the street, the home's facade remains unchanged, except for a new slatted timber fence and a storage area topped with planting.

Polysmiths was founded by Wu in 2017. Previous projects include the renovation of a Wanstead home informed by Mediterranean villas and the redesign of a Tufnell Park basement flat to feel like a "cabin in the woods." The photography of Pine House is by Lorenzo Zandri.

Pine House joins a growing run of London terrace renovations that treat daylight, rather than floor area, as the scarce resource worth engineering for.