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      Island Rest is a black-timber holiday home on the English coast

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      British practice Ström Architects has completed Island Rest, a low-lying holiday home in the Isle of Wight that is clad in beams of blackened larch wood.Island Rest has been designed by Ström Architects as a “home away from home” for a family of four, who wanted a place where they could spend quality time together.
      The house is nestled in a creek that looks out across The Solent, a 20-mile-long stretch of water that separates the Isle of Wight from mainland England.

      First revealed in a series of renderings in 2018, the now-complete Island Rest house comprises a single-storey rectilinear volume clad with beams of black-stained larch wood.

      A low-lying structure was specifically chosen so as not to compromise views of the surrounding natural landscape.

      “We wanted the house to sit quietly against the backdrop of trees, while feeling like it embraced the views when looking out,” said the practice.
      “Our clients asked for an architecturally timeless building, drawing on the very best modern architectural concepts to create a whole – no frivolous moves; rigour must flow through every space and every detail that the building is.”

      As the area surrounding Island Rest is prone to flooding, it has been positioned to sit at the highest point of the site.
      At one end the house is supported by a grassy hill, but as this gradually slopes away, slim metal poles are instead used to elevate the structure.

      Magnus Ström models gabled annex for Hampshire home on “rustic boutique hotel”

      Expansive panels of glazing have also been fitted on both sides of the home to maximise sightlines and natural light.

      Inside lies an open-plan living and dining area, complete with a jet-black kitchen suite. This leads off to a fleet of bedrooms for the owners’ three young children.
      Each room has been given a largely simple fit-out to make them “places to sleep and not places to stay”, in a bid to encourage the children to spend more time playing outdoors.

      To give the parents a greater sense of privacy, their bedroom has been placed on the opposite side of the house.
      It has ensuite bathroom facilities and access to a small deck that leads down to the swimming pool and verdant garden.
      “Landscaping was a consideration from the outset and has a very natural and organic feel, with mowed paths through wildflowers leading to and defining areas of different function and interest,” added the practice.

      Ström Architects was established in 2010 and is based in the New Forest, a district of Hampshire, England.
      Other homes on the picturesque Isle of Wight include The Sett by Dow Jones Architects, which takes design cues from black-painted fishermen sheds seen dotted along the island’s beaches.
      There’s also House for a Yachtsman by The Manser Practice, which is punctuated by several glazed openings.
      Photography is by Nick Hufton of Hufton + Crow.

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      ARC Club is a London co-working space for people wanting to escape working from home

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      Architect Caro Lundin took a less-is-more approach for the creation of ARC Club, a fuss-free co-working space in east London for those struggling to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic.It took just six weeks for Lundin and her self-titled studio to complete ARC Club, which takes over a formerly characterless retail unit in the neighbourhood of Homerton.
      The co-working space is meant to cater to the growing number of individuals who, according to surveys observed by Lundin, are finding it tricky to efficiently do their job from home during the pandemic due to lack of proper workspaces.

      Its “starkly beautiful” interiors have been decked out with a selection of low-cost and durable materials that Lundin felt reflected a climate where co-working is “a necessity and not a nice-to-have”.

      Designing a more modest space also meant that membership would be cheaper for those interested in working at ARC Club according to the architect.
      “Intricate details and indoor gardens are fun, but they come with a big price tag – and they’re a lot harder to keep clean,” said Lundin, who founded ARC Club alongside Hannah Philp.

      “When designing ARC Club, I asked myself ‘what do people need to work?’ A comfortable seat, natural light, thoughtful acoustics; the physical and emotional space in which to think,” she told Dezeen.
      “Functional doesn’t have to be boring, it’s a neutral space that enables the people who visit it to be their best professional selves.”

      At the centre of ARC Club, which measures just over 232 square metres, are a pair of boxy, sound-proofed pods crafted from birch plywood.
      Inside, they accommodate a handful of private meeting rooms, storage cupboards, printers and a kitchenette complete with silver-metal cabinetry.
      Lundin chose to house these services inside a pod-style system so that it can be scaled up or down to suit different-sized branches of ARC Club that open in the future.

      The pods are surrounded by various work areas. A few of the furnishings, like the birch-ply tables with the arched legs, were made by Lundin’s studio while some of the chairs were sourced second hand.

      “Offices are going to get much smaller” after pandemic says Sevil Peach

      Pops of colour have been introduced to brighten up the space. Heavy orange curtains are used as room dividers, blue cone-shaped pendant lights have been suspended from the ceiling and bands of yellow paint have been made on the concrete structural columns.
      Yellow tiles also clad surfaces in the bathrooms.

      Further branches of ARC Club co-working spaces are planned to open in 2021.
      Like the Homerton location, they will occupy vacant high-street commercial units in popular residential areas so that members can do what Lundin has monikered “WNH” – work near home.

      “A neighbourhood workplace like ARC Club allows people to retain the best of what the office has to offer – full functionality, work-life separation and human interaction – without having to get on a bus or a train,” Lundin explained.
      “In essence, it’s an accessible flexible option for a new breed of remote worker who has grown used to scheduling their work around their day, instead of the other way.”

      The global coronavirus crisis has forced many to re-think offices and the way in which we work.
      Interior designer Sevil Peach predicts that, post-pandemic, companies will scrap working in corporate towers and instead opt to have central “hubs” where just a small per cent of staff will gather.
      Architecture practice Weston Williamson + Partners also released a series of graphics that illustrated how businesses could create socially-distanced offices. Tips included wrapping screens around desks, having touch-free doors and employing a cook so that employees don’t have to use a shared kitchen.
      Photography is by Andrew Meredith.

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      Tsubo House in Hackney features tiny Japanese-style courtyard

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      Architecture practice Fraher & Findlay has renovated and extended a home in east London, adding a small courtyard that offers glimpses of old and new parts of the property.Tsubo House was originally built in Hackney during the Victorian era and over the years had come to look shabby and unloved.
      The house’s current owners – the founders of Studio XAG – brought architecture practice Fraher & Findlay on board to carry out a complete overhaul.

      As part of the works, the Brockley-based practice constructed a spacious back-garden extension.

      It was key for this new living space to feel closely connected to existing rooms in the home and not too distanced from the basement level, which is often utilised by visiting friends and family.

      Fraher & Findlay decided to insert a small courtyard at ground level that would visually link together the new and existing parts of the home.

      Fraher & Findlay adds wildflower-topped extension to London house

      It draws upon tsubo-niwas – tiny interior courtyards that are incorporated into Japanese buildings to provide natural views and bring in additional sunlight.
      The courtyards are traditionally the same size as a tsubo, a Japanese measuring unit of 3.3 square metres that’s roughly equivalent to the area of two tatami mats.

      “We wanted an external environment to act as a pivot point between the spaces, whilst acting as an environmental tool to bring in lots of natural light and to aid natural ventilation,” said the practice.
      “It feels like a quiet force, providing life energy to the house.  it is visible from all the rooms in the house with the exception of two bedrooms and one bathroom.”

      The pebbled courtyard is centred by a tree and has an array of potted plants running around its periphery. Leafy climbing plants also wind up its rear wall.
      One window of the courtyard looks through to the older front section of Tsubo House, while the another has views of the new rear extension that accommodates a kitchen and dining area.

      Designed to feel “textured, calm and lived in”, the kitchen has been finished with pink raw-plaster walls and timber joinery. Some of the brass light fixtures were also sourced second-hand from eBay, complementing the curved brass handles on the cupboards.
      The extension has a slatted black-timber facade and a green roof, which the studio introduced so that, when viewed from the baby’s nursery upstairs, this part of the home would look as if it’s wearing a “hairy hat”.
      Flooring of the extension was also made lower than the rest of the home, as a mid-way between the ground and basement levels.

      Plaster surfaces continue through into the home’s living room, which the practice has updated to match the owners’ creative personalities. It’s dressed with velvet furnishings, shaggy rugs and a bubblegum-pink edition of Faye Toogood’s Roly-Poly chair.
      Decades-old paintwork has also been stripped back from the ornate cornices, ceiling roses and skirting boards.

      More quirky features appear upstairs – the nursery, for example, has a midnight blue ceiling speckled with stars, and all of the bathrooms feature graphic monochromatic tiled floors. One even includes its own fireplace and a freestanding jet-black tub.
      The project also saw Fraher & Findlay create a loft extension for Tsubo House that accommodates an additional bedroom and wash facilities.

      Fraher & Finlay was established in 2009. The practice has previously created a wildflower-topped extension and renovated a home to feature traces of its original architecture.
      Photography is by Adam Scott.
      Project credits:
      Architect: Fraher & FindlayInterior design: Studio XAGEngineer: PD DesignContractor: Steflay DevelopmentsGarden and planting design: Miria Harris

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      Aesop's London store takes its colour from the red sandstone of Glamis Castle

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      Precast stone blocks coloured with red sandstone from Glamis Castle in Scotland form the walls of this refuge-style Aesop store that architecture studio Al-Jawad Pike has created in a west London shopping centre.The studio designed the small store for skincare brand Aesop to be a retreat from the bustling aisles of Westfield shopping centre in Sheperd’s Bush.
      “We wanted the store to be a refuge from the busy mall environment, it is a sort of building within a building – using genuine masonry construction rather than applied finishes or surfaces,” Al-Jawad Pike co-founder Jessam Al-Jawad told Dezeen.

      Al-Jawad Pike chose to build the walls of the store from precast stone blocks, which enclose the space and create a feeling akin to a walled garden. The curved form of the walls is also meant to reference the undulating brickwork of Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste.

      “The concept was to create a kind of walled garden within the mall,” said Al-Jawad.
      “It was inspired by the ‘crinkle crankle’ wall of the English countryside as well as the structures of Eladio Dieste, which both use an undulating waveform to give rigidity to a single skin of masonry.”

      Earthy tones have been applied throughout the store. Powder from the same red sandstone that was used to make the 17th-century Glamis Castle in Scotland has been used to colour the precast stone blocks.
      The resulting red blockwork walls, which were built using two standard shapes of precast blocks, have been paired with red concrete-tile flooring and a clay plaster ceiling.

      Frida Escobedo segments Aesop Park Slope with rammed-earth brickwork

      “We wanted to use a warm colour to provide a sense of natural earthiness that reflected the red bricks of typical masonry walled gardens, said Al-Jawad.
      “The colour is called Glamis red named after the red sandstone of Glamis Castle in Scotland.”

      Set against the earthy red backdrop, Aesop’s products are displayed on stainless steel shelves. While the main space is broken up by three cast resin sinks that were produced by Sabine Marcelis.
      “We hope we created a calm ambience that enables customers to engage with the Aesop products,” Al-Jawad explained.
      “The hand-washing sinks which are a big part of the customers’ interaction with the product and the sales people are also given centre stage – being made out of honey-coloured resin they also look a bit like big bars of sculpted soap.”

      Aesop often allows its designers to create monotonal stores. For its Sydney store, architecture studio Snøhetta used granite to covers almost every surface, while Frida Escobedo used rammed-earth brickwork throughout its store in Brooklyn. Bernard Dubois also clad the walls of the brand’s Brussels store in distinctive yellow Belgian bricks.
      London-based Al-Jawad Pike was established by Al-Jawad and Dean Pike in 2014. The studio has previously used pigmented concrete blockwork for the exterior and interior of a south London home extension and combined brick, concrete and timber for an extension to a home in Stoke Newington.
      Photography is by Ståle Eriksen.

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      Yellow Cloud Studio punctuates Glyn House extension with arched window

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      A half-arch window in this east London home extension by Yellow Cloud Studio offers glimpses of the older parts of the property. Glyn House is situated in the neighbourhood of Clapton and is occupied by a young couple who are hoping to grow their family. Previously, the poky proportions of the house – which dates […] More

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      Gabriel Chipperfield gives London newsagents plush revamp

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      Gabriel Chipperfield has created an “Alice in Wonderland”-style warren of luxurious rooms behind Shreeji newsagents in central London. Shreeji newsagent and tobacconist is located on Chiltern Street in London’s affluent Marylebone neighbourhood, just a stone’s throw from the notable hotel Chiltern Firehouse. The shop was set up by Sandeep Garg in 1982, and has since […] More

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      Grove Park house by O'Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects has wooden lining and verdant views

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      O’Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects has created ash-lined living spaces with expansive windows inside a gardener’s home in Lewisham, southeast London. Grove Park is an end-of-terrace house that was originally built back in the 1980s. The wood-lined rooms that O’Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects has created are on the home’s ground floor, which was extended by incorporating a small […] More

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      2LG Studio enlivens Louisville Road house in London with bright hues

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      In a colourful overhaul of this period house in Tooting, south London, 2LG Studio has added dusky pink walls, blue tilework and coral-orange cabinetry. Louisville Road house falls under the Heaver Estate conservation area – a series of period properties that were constructed between 1888 and 1910 in south London’s Balham and Tooting neighbourhoods. The […] More