A new single family home in a conservation area in Hackney, to the rear of an existing Victorian house.

The three bedroom house replaces a single storey garage on site, and its adjacency to other properties dictated its height restriction.

In a variation of a typical quadrangle, the compact plan wraps around a front sunken courtyard to the street side. The ground floor, accessed via a bridge from the street, contains the public functions, while a top lit staircase leads down into the more intimate bedrooms in the basement.

The habitable rooms receive light from the front lightwell, while at the rear, a smaller lightwell allows natural light into another bedroom and a study space.

The modest new street elevation is mostly hidden behind a fence due to the proximity of windows to the pavement, but it offers the public realm additional greening and replacement trees, along the road to the nearby park.