Kew Terrace

Kew Terrace is the transformation of a mid-Victorian end-of-terrace house in Kew into a luminous family home. The project was shaped by a single constraint and a single opportunity: the house sits in a conservation area with strict controls on external alterations, but it enjoys a south-facing rear garden of extraordinary depth and quality.

Rather than the conventional rear extension, we proposed a small but precisely detailed garden studio at the far end of the garden, connected to the main house by a narrow passage of glazed link. This allows the house itself to remain largely as found — its Victorian proportions and character intact — while providing the additional space the family needed.

The studio is a timber-framed pavilion clad in narrow-profile cedar boards, its mono-pitch roof oriented to maximise solar gain in winter while the deep eaves provide shade in summer. The interior is a single room of about forty square metres, lined in birch plywood with a polished concrete floor and a wood-burning stove at its centre.

The garden itself was redesigned as a sequence of distinct rooms — a lawn, a kitchen garden, a shaded dining terrace, and the studio at the far end — each separated by clipped hornbeam hedges that provide enclosure and mark the transition between spaces.