London-based 31/44 Architects have built Six Columns, a house for its architect owner and family on a garden plot in Crystal Palace, South East London. The design responds to a trapezoidal site with a large Sycamore tree, incorporating architectural detail from the neighbouring house and also from the owner’s travels. Conceived as a blend of a farmhouse and a California Case Study House, it reflects the directness of 1950s British architecture. The house is designed to evolve and prioritises shared spaces, minimising individual sleeping areas and contained rooms.
The design creates two gardens separated by the kitchen and living space. A further family space and bedroom on the ground floor are supplemented with two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor, along with a loft space and bedroom on the second floor.
To avoid damaging the tree roots steel screw piles are carefully placed instead of concrete foundations. The ground floor features exposed brickwork, a concrete frame with joinery subdividing the spaces, and concrete beams that allow wide openings to the gardens. Upstairs, internal masonry is replaced with a timber frame, avoiding the use of structural steel. Externally, there is a brickwork outer leaf and concrete beams, with the timber eaves clad in cement board.
The house is fully electric, with an air-source heat pump for heating and hot water, triple-glazing, underfloor heating, and passive stack ventilation. It achieves an actual performance of 1.78 tonnes of CO2 per year compared to 6 tonnes for an average house. The low-maintenance west-facing rainwater garden provides evening light for the kitchen, living room and bedroom, while the south-facing terrace, accessible from the kitchen, is a drought-resistant garden. Rainwater is channelled into water butts with runoff managed on-site. Photo credit Nick Dearden. 31/44 Architects
