The clients originally commissioned us to design a house for them on the river (Thames) at Weybridge. Having agreed all the designs with them and on the point of making a planning application, the clients decided to move to Hong Kong for work reasons … and so the exciting plans for the new house were scrapped. Several years later, they came back to London, bought a house in Grove Park, Chiswick and made contact with us again with the idea that we could help them renovating and upgrading the house that they had bought. The house is a typical ‘suburban semi’ of no real architectural merit – ie. it is identical to countless houses up and down the country, but it had one redeeming feature … for a London house it had a reasonably generous amount of outside space – it had a front garden, a garden at the side of the house and a rear garden. Due to the wrap-around nature of the garden, we have responded to this in our design scheme, by pushing out two matching pods in the westerly direction with a courtyard space between. This allows the evening sunlight to penetrate deep into the house, and to ensure that light permeates the whole of the house, we chose to remove all the internal structural walls and to create a totally open plan ground floor living area. Our clients have spent many years living in the far east and are particularly keen on open plan living and on having very light and airy homes. So our plans to open up the house, removing all internal wall and in having generous amounts of floor to ceiling glazing on to the garden areas ticked a lot of boxes. Coupled with this concept, we found that we shared a fundamental idea about design with our clients -that being that the right place for a kitchen is slap bang in the middle of the house, and so that is where the kitchen was positioned in this scheme. The kitchen has commanding views in all directions and enjoys taking centre stage ! The island unit which is cast in concrete (which was done by the same specialist firm that did the polished concrete floor) is very much the central hub of the house and all family life revolves around this monolithic unit. We reckon that this project not only celebrates open plan living, but also represents a fantastic advert for the concept. Of course there was a structural and financial consequence in removing all the internal walls, and 25 separate steel sections were inserted in to the ceiling to support the upper floors of the house – but the cost and disturbance is more than justified by the end result which is both spectacular and extremely user-friendly. The time money and effort that went into the renovation project has all been well spent, and our clients live in a house that far more resembles a contemporary new build house than a converted 1930’s suburban semi. It’s what we call a result !