Variant Office transformed this 1930s detached house into a bright, airy 5-bed family home with an elegant garden extension designed for entertaining, topped with a striking glass & timber roof. We transformed this house in Raynes Park by extending to the rear, replacing a leaking conservatory, & upwards to create a modern 5-bedroom family home. Our clients wanted the new extension to maintain the connection with the garden & the sky, creating a space for entertainment, with cooking taking centre stage. We conceived of a space nestled into the garden. We designed the deep fins to sculpt the sunlight as it moved through the day, limiting the afternoon glare. A restrained palette of high-quality materials, in concrete, timber & brick, was chosen for their timelessness, longevity & ease of maintenance. The dark-painted kitchen is a counterpoint to the white brick extension, topped with a timber-lined roof, all connected by a concrete floor that also forms the worktop, seating, and steps to the garden. The clients were keen for well-connected yet intimate spaces, so we designed the ground floor to create a natural flow around the joinery wall with the kitchen at its heart. These moves set up long vistas across the house that connected the spaces in this broken plan layout, resulting in a space suitable for modern life. A sculptural staircase snakes from the ground floor to the new loft, which contains two rooms & a bathroom. The joinery wall breaks the plan into 3 zones defining the entrance & hallway from the intimate front room & the open social room to the rear. The dark block colour of the kitchen sits in contrast to the bright roof-lit extension. The timber roof cants midway across its width to create a counterpoint between the intimate dining space and the vaulted living space. The modelling of the concrete floor forms the kitchen island, perimeter seating and steps into the garden. We developed & produced the fabrication information for specialist elements like the timber roof & the stairs, which gave us greater control over rising costs in the post-COVID material shortage, without which many of the design features would have been value engineered. The resulting scheme is sympathetic to London's character & meshes into its neighbourhood. A great deal of time and effort went into the coordination of the key elements of the project. We used daylight studies to develop the triangulated structure to sculpt the sunlight as it moved across the room. The roof is canted, drawing the reflected afternoon sun into the space. The deep beams minimise the sun's glare at low angles and support the glazing above. To achieve the clean lines of the timber roof, we needed the careful design to control the fixing locations & cleat design, without compromising the ease of installation by the General Contractor to keep costs down.