RO-016_REIGATE
Reorientation: Complete house reconfiguration & garage conversion
This family had just bought a detached 1970’s house, which had been squeezed into a previously wider plot of a Victorian corner property. It featured an unnecessarily big garage, run down finishes inside and an uninspiring layout of smallish rooms and a big corridor with a lot of lost circulation space.
It was not necessary to extend it but it was rather in need of a reconfiguration internally and in relation or in order to impact on the use of the external areas as well.
The front garden of the house was the generous, sunny grass area with flowers and bushes around, whereas the rear was smallish and partly in shade. The other area where the sun reached the plot, the utility room build-out and an old shed blocked the light.
As these diagrams show our approach was to link the living area of the house to the sunny front garden and make it private and more enclosed by moving the front door and therefore main access to the garage.
This worked in line with creating an open plan layout for the ground floor.
The shed and utility room were taken down and the side of the house opened with glass doors to lead onto a sunny terrace. The kitchen became positioned as a block in the middle of the overall open-plan layout, allowing two social areas (sofas on one side and big table on the other) to benefit from 2 different aspects of the garden and which could also be separated internally as shown in the picture.
The former garage was converted and linked to the main body of the house. It features an angled storage wall for toys, books etc. hiding behind it a utility room and a boiler-storage-kids-bike room and a WC. A generous glass screen links the main piano and play area to the front garden as well. The storage wall leads up a few steps to the focus point, the dining table.
The project managed to turn the atmosphere and the way the house is used completely around and successfully developed its potential on a tight budget. New good quality windows, new bathrooms and a general make-over of finishes was part of the works.
A bright colour scheme underlines the quirky design.
Photos: Roger Deckker