Hasta La Ideas

Architecture studio Pricegore has renovated a modernist townhouse in Chelsea, London, reconfiguring the four-storey house into a contemporary three-bedroom home.

Pricegore aimed to revamp the existing home by creating generous and flexible living spaces, while respecting the building’s brutalist ideals with exposed material finishes.

While investigating the site’s history, the studio discovered the deep foundations of former Victorian homes below the current townhouse structure. The excavation resulted in a partially subterranean ground floor designed to recall Brazilian mid-century modernist homes by expressing concrete retaining walls, kitchen worktops and window sills.

Both the ground floor and first floor living room were finished with floor to ceiling glazed partitions overlooking a green threshold of tall grasses and plants.

“[The foundations] meant we could easily excavate to recreate the old split-level character of the Victorian ground floor and in doing so create a kitchen and living space with high ceilings,” Pricegore director Dingle Price told Dezeen.

“We sought to maximise connections to nature with a very densely planted garden that has a strong presence in the lower ground floor living space, whilst the upper floor living room looks out onto a green roof.”

Every bedroom was configured with views of surrounding canopy trees, including the matching pair of second floor bedrooms and the open-plan main suite on the third floor.

Pricegore prioritised texture and tone in their material selection. It opted for neutral, soft-coloured fixtures to sit against the off-white walls, reclaimed timber and cement floor finishes.

Existing concrete slab soffits were revealed and lime-washed, while concrete beams were sand-blasted to create a raw and gritty appearance.

“The new works take their momentum from the existing building,” Price said. “There is no contrast, either internally or externally, between the old and the new.”

Proportions of windows were subtly altered with dividing columns and by lowering sills. Slender aluminium window profiles were also chosen to recall the original 1960s frames.

“When working with an existing structure, our ambition is almost always to amplify the inherent qualities of the original architecture,” Price said.

An automated skylight was introduced over the stairway to draw natural light to the interior and to create a passive cooling effect for summer.

“We admired the rational design of this brutalist terrace and its formal expression… [but] it needed total renovation in terms of thermal performance and energy efficiency,” Price explained.

“We think of the project as a collaboration with the original architects,” he continued .

“We hope [they] would appreciate the project, that they would see that we have tried to tailor their speculative housing design of the 60s to the specific requirements of a contemporary family.”

Pricegore is a London-based architecture practice founded by Dingle Price and Alex Gore in 2013. The studio has previously collaborated with designer Yinka Ilori to create a multicoloured pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture and completed a yellow-framed extension for an artist in east London.

The photography is by Johan Dehlin

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