Following the purchase of a house in Snaresbrook, East London in 2010, the new owners wished to renovate the house and bring it up to a standard suitable for their own use as a modern family home. The brief centred around removing the cellular division of cooking, dining and living spaces on the ground floor and provide an unobstructed open-plan extension with a prominent relationship to a terrace and the garden, but to also have intimate spaces which would allow the family to be within a single room but able to engage in separate activities. The design opened up and extended the rear of the house to provide differing levels of physical and visual permeability, openness and intimacy. Formally, it mimics and reinterprets the pitched roof of the original building creating a unique form that belies the extension’s scale. Projecting canopies, cantilevered eaves and a staggered plan, in which the garden enters the footprint of the house, enclose spaces that embrace the programmes and patterns of modern family life.