Timber Extension Project

Hi there, I'm Timothy Burgess and I would like to talk to you today through one of the projects that we’ve done to try to explore some of the ideas that we’ve talked about. So this project was a Victorian house and somebody wanted an extension. There’s an existing conservatory, it has some photographs and what they want to do is take that conservatory away and replace it with a new timber extension to make a little box that looks out across the garden, provide some storage space and then make sense of the little yard behind. So here’s a quick sketch of the back of the house, just to explain that, there’s the dotted line where the conservatory is, the garden is this way and here’s the little garden—

So, we’ve kept the building to a very simple idea which is this little box that we’ve just added in to this return here. So that’s the existing house from the garden, it’s this way. There’s the space where a day bed and a window looking across the garden, a storage box here and a yard there. And you can see this is the section which is effectively cut through here looking at the building where we found—added in the magic. And so what we’ve done here is to lift off this roof and you’ll see that’s a curved timber roof which has light coming in the front and the back and that light coming in all around means that that roof feels like it’s effectively kind of lifted off and it’s floating above like a little cloud. And then here’s our day bed, a storage box at the back and we’ve got a raised planter in here so that this space now becomes quite green and when you're looking on to that, you're looking into a green space rather than kind of a storage yard.

So this is the visualization of what that might look like and you can see there the floating roof and this is kind of glowing and the reason for that is because we haven’t quite any down lights in there. What we’ve done is to introduce some external lights here, they are shining through that glass so the light bouncing off that bellied roof. And because this is timber, we get very warm light off there and here’s our day bed with out view out, of course the very—here’s our storage space and the new plant here so that these windows are now looking on to a green space. Now this project is actually finished. So here’s some photographs of the finished thing. And you can see here the view from the garden, we’ve got this big window and the greenery around. And when we come inside, you can see the space that we’ve made which is the day bed and the big window which is of course what it’s all about, that’s just that space to the end of the garden and the timber of the new building creates kind of warmth and a softness and also the acoustics, very soft as well. And so just taking a very simple box but just doing something a little more clever with it to bring in the light in the right places, to create a nice place to sit and to use the right materials just to create a figment of warmth and kind of comfort and that’s what's taken this little building and just elevated it a little bit to make a little piece of architecture.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services