About

BOX designed a modest family home for a young couple. The design incorporated plans for a future extension. The house is 3 bedrooms, one bathroom and kitchen/dining/living separated by a split level. The garage under the dwelling is cleverly wrapped to create a ’lightbox’ element with the property floating above it.

The split levels add drama to an otherwise flat site. BOX designed kitchens, bathrooms and lighting as part of the design & build project.

Type Residential: Single family residence
Location: Wellington, New Zealand
Building status: built in 2012
Number of stories: 1
Site type: urban

Theophilus London – Love Is Real (music video)

Music Video of the Song Vicious Circles by Kase Prince (Musician from London, UK)

Just follow the Link to his Tumblr-Blog

Video for Action Bronson’s & Statik Selektah’s – Not Enough Words Track

The Nomad Hotel
New York 

A new addition to New York’s North of Madison Square Park district housed in a converted turn of the century Beaux-Arts building. NoMad derives its name from the district that it is located in [No]rth of [Mad]ison Square; the brand new hotel oozes modern European grandeur combined with a characteristic Downtown edge. The building has been fully restored to its original splendor and its magnificent interiors are the inspiration of the multi talented French architect/interior and garden designer Jacques Garcia.

Jacques Garcia himself is best known for his contemporary interiors for Paris’ hotels and restaurants including the famous Hôtel Costes, as well as for his unique house with the astonishing gardens, The Château du Champ-de-Bataille, which we were fortunate enough to visit last year as part of our visit at The Goodwill Revival.

The Sydell Group acquired the magnificent turn of the century building in the spring of 2008, which is located just one block away from The Ace Hotel New York. The 133,000 square-foot landmark building was then converted into a Parisian inspired lifestyle hotel that speaks to the building’s architectural heritage. The NoMad hotel which opened its doors to the public on April 1, 2012 is intended to be a fresh take on the classic grand hotels of Europe with a distinct New York feeling and twist however. Whereby the interiors are inspired by the Parisian flat of Garcia’s youth, the building’s restored Haussmann-like façade is cleverly brought inside.

About

The Shadow House is a new build private house in Camden, North London. It has won a 2011 RIBA Award, Best small house of the year award at the British Homes Award 2011, received a commendation at the 2011 NLA Awards and was longlisted for the Manser Medal. We carried out the entire project ourselves, from finding the site, through planning, design, construction and manufacture of the fittings, fixtures and furniture.

The Shadow House is our own home, but is also an experiment in making a generic small city house. While working for other practices, we designed luxurious houses for private clients and worked on complex urban social housing developments; we were keen to extend this experience into building more modest single houses, in order to test our own ideas on living with less. We wanted to create intense interior spaces with maximum emotional effect. Aware of the overcrowded and overpriced London land market, we set out to find a suitable site.

Eventually, we found a 38m2 scrap of land on St Paul’s Crescent in the Camden Square Conservation Area, just north of Kings Cross. It comprised a tumbledown parking garage abutting a terrace of well-preserved late-Victorian houses. Previous owners had made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to win permission to build a new cottage there, and the Planning Inspectorate had upheld the refusals at Appeal. An application to build a new house on a similar plot nearby had resulted in Judicial Review and the attentions of the ODPM. Although we were conscious of the extreme sensitivity of building in this area, the site’s chequered history depressed its value sufficiently for us to buy the site (for £75k) late in the summer of 2006.

Our dealings with the Camden Planners were protracted and delicate. We realised that building on such a contentious site would require a collaborative approach, so we developed the design in close conversation with the Council’s officers. The maximum envelope for the building was determined by its relationship to its neighbours: many ancient lights overlooked our site. The greatest argument, however, was over the building’s external appearance. Keen to employ rapid, low-carbon construction, our earliest scheme was entirely timber-built. However, the conservation lobby’s opinion was that the house should instead reflect its tough, industrial-era context. We took an extreme response to this brief, proposing a dutch-format engineering brick with a black glazed finish resembling the cut face of coal. We contrasted this with sheer, frameless glazing, and with accents of white statuarietto marble, echoing the plaster reveals and porticoes of the surrounding Victorian architecture.

The tectonic of the house was therefore driven by its physical and legislative context. We had developed a robust and monolithic design, reinforced with an unforgiving, monochromatic skin. Because our budget was so tight, we planned to carry out as much work as possible ourselves and limited our palette to primary materials. We found these limits liberating rather than restricting: there is great poetry in practical things, so we reveled in finding simple means of assembling the house.

In order to give a sense of space to what could feel like very constrained rooms, it was important for us to be able to modulate the section and work with some of the heights. Different ceiling heights, adjusted by changes in the floor below and by different height roofs produce a range from 3m in the living room to 2.1m in the entrance area. This allowed us to give each space its own temperature, sound quality and sense of cosiness or airiness. There are certain knots of intensity, where the spatial and functional requirements of the house are tangled up.

The site lies on made ground, a mixture of mobile clay and spoil from the cutting of railway lines to Kings Cross and St Pancras. The substructure comprises reinforced concrete ground beams and piles, while the superstructure is in loadbearing masonry. Larch glu-lam beams (over-sized to maintain structural integrity in the event of fire) are laid directly into the brickwork to support the roof and floor structures. Floor finishes are in polished concrete, poured in-situ. Larch blockboard panels form a back-lit plafond français to the living room and bedroom, and line the deep internal reveals to form inviting window seats. The composition is completed in off-white fitted cabinetry, which we made in the house before sending them off-site to be spray-finished.

Construction work began in August 2009 and we moved in, to our great delight, at the end of January 2011.

Type

Residential – Single family residence

Location

Camden, United Kingdom
built in 2011

About

The Gap House, a narrow new-build terraced London townhouse, designed by Pitman Tozer has won the RIBA Manser Medal 2009, the annual prize for the best one-off house or housing designed by an architect in the United Kingdom.

The house, which is sited on a plot only 2.3m wide within a conservation area in West London, proves that sustainable architecture is achievable without compromise on the tightest of urban sites. The house incorporates a number of green strategies including passive solar gain, high levels of insulation, a ground coupled heat pump and rainwater harvesting to minimize its carbon footprint.

With a street frontage of only 8 ft/2.3 m wide the house sits within a narrow slot, originally the side alley and rear garden of an adjoining property.  The challenge was how to create a Low Carbon Building and make a comfortable 4-bed family home, maximising light and space within the constraints of a tight and awkward site.

The key to achieving a solution where each habitable room has good daylight and feels spacious, even within the narrowest part, was to stack the smaller bedrooms at the front of the house facing the street and to organise the rear in a cascading configuration with the wet rooms and storage occupying the parts of the plan with no natural light.  A courtyard at the rear of the site brings light into the ground floor reception space. A central twisting timber stair held as a piece of sculpture off the walls brings daylight deep into the centre of the plan on each floor.

The house was designed and built for partner of the practice Luke Tozer and his family and developed by the practice as a case study project allowing the partners to put in to practice new strategies for Carbon reduction and energy generation.

The house is designed to use approximately 30% of the energy of a typical house built to current Building Regulations, with a predicted reduction in heating bills of approx. £500-£800/annum. A recent in house post completion assessment rated the house under the Code for Sustainable Homes as grade 4 (Exemplary).

This has been achieved through the following strategies:

+ High levels of insulation in the walls and roof (U value 0.15 W/m2K) and passive solar gain minimise heating requirements.

+ 3 bore holes measuring 50 m deep were installed below the rear courtyard serving a 12KW ground coupled heat pump installed in the plant room, which provides all the heating (including under floor heating) and hot water for the house.

+ Water consumption is minimised through a rainwater harvesting system designed specifically to suit the constrained nature of the site, which is reused to flush the toilets.

+ Natural materials are utilised where possible including lambs wool insulation used for all the internal walls and floor and a sustainably sourced composite Larch board for the stair structure.

+ High performance low energy windows were specified with timber frames made from sustainable Spruce and the glazed units masking the external timber frames.

+ As well as bringing light into the property the geometrically complex self-supporting stairacts as a four-storey stack for passive ventilation in the summer.

Sited in a conservation area between two listed buildings adjoining neighbours were prominent members of the local amenity society who raised vociferous objections to the proposals to construct a contemporary building in such an historic context. Lobbying of local Councillors and careful negotiation on the part of Pitman Tozer was necessary to convince the planning committee that a sympathetic, high quality modern building was appropriate.

The completion of the house is a testament to the architects’ unwavering commitment to the integrity of the scheme and a belief in pioneering environmental design.

‘Overall the most impressive aspect of the design is its level of skill, imagination and practicality in creating a series of apparently generous spaces, despite all the constraints of overlooking, conservation policies and initially hostile residents association…The result is a comfortable home in a great piece of architecture.’

Type

Residential – Single family residence

Location

Bayswater, London, UK
built in 2007

Ground Size

185 m2