Queen’s Park, NW6 6DB
Chevening Road
Light brought to the back of a Queen’s Park house.
- Location
- Queen’s Park, London NW6 6DB
- Duration
- 4 months
- Type
- Extension / Refurbishment / Garden building
A four-month rear extension and refurbishment opening the back of a Queen’s Park house into a single kitchen, dining and living space, lit by rooflights and full-height steel glazing, with a landscaped terrace beyond and a private gym formed within the garden outbuilding.
What we did
- Rear extension and structural opening-up at ground floor
- Steel Crittall-style glazing to the rear elevation
- Rooflights over the kitchen and dining area
- Terrazzo flooring throughout the ground floor
- Bespoke island kitchen and fitted joinery
- Wall panelling to the hall and staircase
- Landscaped rear terrace with built-in seating
- Refurbishment of the garden outbuilding as a private gym
- New sauna
- Rooflights formed within a green roof
- Mechanical, electrical and lighting installation
Structural works
Opening the back of the house
The rear of the house was extended and the ground floor opened up so that the kitchen, dining and living areas read as one space rather than three. The new steelwork was installed to the engineer’s design, with the sequence and any temporary support agreed before the existing rear wall was taken out.
On a terraced Queen’s Park plot the constraint is not the floor area but what the new opening does to the party walls and to the floors above. Padstone positions, bearing lengths and the order in which the beams are loaded were fixed in advance rather than resolved on site.
Daylight and glazing
Steel glazing and rooflights working together
Full-height steel Crittall-style glazing was installed across the rear elevation, with rooflights formed over the kitchen and dining area so that daylight reaches the middle of the plan rather than stopping a metre inside the doors.
Slim steel sections carry very little insulation in the frame itself, so the thermal performance of an elevation like this is decided at the junctions — the threshold, the head detail and the reveal. Those were detailed and built as a set, with the floor build-up and the underfloor heating coordinated to the finished threshold level.
Materials and finishes
Terrazzo, joinery and panelling
The ground floor is laid in terrazzo, run continuously from the kitchen through to the glazing so that the floor reads as one plane. A terrazzo floor is unforgiving: the screed has to be flat and dry to tolerance before anything is laid, and the movement joints have to be set out with the room rather than chased in afterwards.
The kitchen is a bespoke island unit in painted joinery with a stone worktop, and the hall and staircase are panelled and painted to match. Lighting, power and audiovisual routes were set out before the panelling went on, so nothing is surface-fixed.
External works
The terrace and the garden building
The rear garden was landscaped with a stone-paved terrace, built-in seating and planting beds retained in tiled and rendered walls, stepping up to the lawn beyond.
The existing garden outbuilding was refurbished over seven weeks of the programme to form a private gym, with a new sauna and rooflights set within a green roof. Forming rooflights in a green roof means the waterproofing, the upstand heights and the drainage falls have to be resolved together with the growing medium and its edge restraints, not after them.
Photographs
6 photographs of the finished house. Click one to enlarge.
