Learning from Chapel Market

I've spent the last three years building a pair of houses on Chapel Market, Islington, London. Here's an attempt to describe some of the architectural themes of the building. Photos of the project on our website: http://www.edgleydesign.co.uk/residential/chapel-market


The houses are two newbuild freeholds, built on the site of a former workshop behind a row of terraced houses. The workshops have an interesting history- first millineries with a hat shop on the street, then shoes, and finally a late night adult chatline centre. Neighbours told me stories of salubrious sounds drifting up from the building, mingling into a background babble of unmentionables wafting past their windows...

By the time I found the site it was derelict and had been empty for many years. Hundreds of pigeons had made it their home, leaving me with a twinge of guilt when I cleared the site - the birds kept returning to their ancestral home until a neighbour started shooting at them!

The site had many problems - a high wall on all sides prevented any views out from windows, and neighbours looked down on all sides creating issues in terms of privacy. The wall however became the key to the project - the site is hidden away and has virtually no public elevation. Chapel Market is a conservation area, bringing all design under the aesthetic control of the council, but the privacy of the site allowed me design freedom, once the height and sightlines of the building were agreed.

The building became an internal experience, with a coutyard sunk into each plot to bring light down to the ground floor. As the building was constructed, a wonderful backyard urban view emerged over the gardens at first floor, but the experience of the ground floor living spaces is still introspective and enclosed - you can wander the house naked at any time of day without offending anyone as far as I know.

The building was concieved as a development project, which put strict limits on extravagance. This became an extremely positive driver for the project, trimming every idea and space to its bare essentials- nothing is superfluous, or wasted. A feeling of calm pervades the building as a result, and an aesthetic emerges from the simplicity. Aadjaye houses inspired a formal resolution of this that takes a minimal pallette of materials, and carves a sculptural form from the space through the careful application of detail. Surfaces wrap to produce figures, their power derived from strong contrast to other building elements, or to existing building fabric.

Details and articulations are accetuated by careful placing of lights, adding colour and frivolity to the sombre seriousness of the materials.

A difficulty with a new building is patina, and connecting to the warm comfort of history that pervades the historical fabric of London. Modern developments are particularly bad, with endless white surfaces in pretence of modernism, and proportions whittled down to a compression which completely opposes any of the meditative peace of a huge clean white space. Minimalism has become an excuse for an abscence of anything.

Chapel Market has its fair share of white walls, but this is balanced by a spread of natural, tactile materials that are inviting and warm to the touch, and that absorb the passing of time, developing texture and patina and dissolving the newness of the building. It's been a really interesting process to watch - at an amazing pace the chestnut cladding to the facades has faded and darkened, its colours taking on the natural hues of its surroundings. I took a photo yesterday from a building oppostite, less than a year since the building was complete, and the houses have blended so successfully I have to admit to a twinge of regret at the loss of my new shiney house, clear for the world to see! However this was the whole point so my inclinations to stand out have to be suppressed..

This is a very brief outline of the project and some of its related themes, and which i am sure I will expand on soon. Meanwhile, I hope you like the project, and more photos of the house as it grows will appear on this website over time.