Commendation for best house of three or more storeys
Commendation for best small housing development
Notting ventured
It is a measure of the demand for a Notting Hill address that a pair of contemporary new houses – semi-detached houses, no less – fronting directly onto the pavement in Portobello Road, though with their front doors set back at the top of a flight of steps, should command selling prices of £2 million each. That was the price for a three-bedroom, three-bathroom three-storey house of around 200 sq metres (2,153 sq ft) with virtually no garden and definitely no garage or off-street parking space – and with double yellow
lines on the road outside.
This is, of course, largely due to the popularity of Hugh Grant’s film Notting Hill and the legendary antiques street market in Portobello Road. Fortunately, these houses are at the top (southern) end of Portobello Road, away from the street market, but near to where George Orwell once lived at 22 Portobello Road and, more recently, where comedy actors Peter Butterworth and his wife Janet Brown lived.
Google still shows 61-63 Portobello Road as the premises of specialist antique dealers David & Charles Wainwright, but their former showrooms in a converted industrial building next to St Peter’s Church Hall (which is used as a nursery school) and the Lazy Daisy Café have now been replaced by this stunning pair of houses designed by Alan Power Architects.
One may be excused for thinking that these are only two-storey houses, but in fact each has two bedrooms and bathrooms on the lower ground floor, which are lit by borrowed light from the ground-floor windows at the front and by a small open area at the back, where the full-height glazing is canted to avoid the feeling of looking straight over the existing rear boundary wall. This allows space for a small landscaped patio outside the main bedroom and - by having a metal latticed grating over half the space - a balcony off the dining area on the upper ground floor.
The main living room for each house occupies the whole of the top floor, which has the most natural light and the best views up and down Portobello Road from its front balcony.
The intermediate (or upper ground) floor has the entrance hall, stairs, kitchen/dining area and the third bedroom (or study) and a bathroom. By having the entrances to the houses recessed back from the pavement line, the feeling of the front doors opening directly onto the Portobello Road is avoided. Similarly the rotating vertical timber screens set within the front walls of the houses can be adjusted to give complete privacy or openness.
The gull-wing roof shape allows for clerestory glazing on three sides. The open-tread staircases with glass balustrades rising through all three floors of the houses enhance the feeling of openness and light throughout.
The judges were impressed by the ingenuity in designing a pair of elegant contemporary townhouses on such a small, restricted site in a busy street. They not only gave the show house, 63 Portobello Road, a commendation in the category for Best House of Three or More Storeys, but also a commendation for both of them in the category for Best Small Housing Development. To have had two such highquality entries this year as this pair of houses in Portobello Road and the terrace of three houses in Tonsley Road is a measure of the value of these awards in unearthing interesting developments that prove there is virtually no site so difficult that it cannot be developed in a way that is exemplary and stimulating. Would that all homebuilders devoted so much thought, time and effort on their more mundane sites.
HomeBuilder: SOUTH WESTERN BUILDERS (STREET) LIMITED
King-o-Mill, Keinton Mandeville, Somerton, Somerset TA11 6DG
Tel 01458 224074 Fax 01458 224057
Contact: Andy Wall, Director
Architects: ALAN POWER ARCHITECTS LIMITED
5 Haydens Place, London W11 1LY
Tel 020 7229 9375 Fax 020 7221 4172
Contact: Alan Power, Director
Email apa@dircon.co.uk
Photography: HUFTON + CROW BOX STUDIOS
(07973 197645 or 07881 586726)
