The ultimate gap house: unwanted wedge-shaped plot in Shoreditch turned into a stunning family home over four floors

The extraordinary house took six years to build but has created a 2,368sq ft family home from an unwanted sliver of land in east London.
Ruth Bloomfield16 March 2020

The building site Oliver Lazarus was thinking of spending almost £250,000 on did not have a lot going for it.

It was an awkward shape and legally complex, so no wonder no one else wanted it. It had been on the market for years. But Oliver bought it.

It took him and his wife, Anu Kumar, almost five years to cut through the necessary bureaucracy and start work on turning it into their family home in Shoreditch. And it took another two years before their vision began to rise from the ground.

Now the couple and their daughter Shala, 13, and son Obi, 12, live in an extraordinary-looking home that lends itself perfectly to ordinary family life.

Inside the home built on derelict land in Shoreditch

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Oliver and Anu, who met in 2002, are both long-term Hackney residents. As their family grew they began hunting for plots to build a home. Their two-year search ended at a corner plot near Columbia Road flower market.

It was just 12ft by 216ft and had already been considered and rejected by a long line of architects and self-builders. “One of the challenges was to build something where the spaces felt well-proportioned,” says Oliver.

The site was empty except for a hut and had a restrictive legal covenant preventing residential use. Despite this, in 2011 the couple paid £240,000 for the ungainly sliver of land.

“It felt like a lot of money to be handing over,” says Oliver, an architect and director of Urban Mesh Design (urbanmesh.com). “I remember thinking, Oh my God, what have I done?”

Fighting through the red tape necessary to lift the covenant and win planning permission for a four-storey, three- to four-bedroom house with a series of roof terraces, was not a speedy process: not until spring 2016 could the two-year build begin.

A GLINTING LANDMARK

The couple wanted a practical, functional house with space for the family, guests, entertaining and somewhere for Anu, who is a doctor, playwright and yoga teacher, to work.

Masses of storage space was essential. They also hoped to contribute to the streetscape, “to create a fun moment in an area we love”, says Oliver.

Striking: making great use of a tight, wedge-shaped plot, the family house, with glinting black brick-and-mirror façade, is part of a terrace of contemporary homes in E2
Charles Hosea

Oliver’s solution was to take bricks and make them shine. The façade of the building is a Welsh blanket formation of black bricks, some glazed to a burnished raven, others matt, interspersed with sections of mirror cladding.

The ground floor is overlaid with a bronzy, anodised aluminium grid which looks fabulously bespoke and expensive but is in fact panels of anti-slip safety flooring more usually used in factories.

In daylight the front of the house looks like a dark and textured tower; at night the street lights make it glitter. Passers-by often stop to take pictures.

To save money Oliver split the work into two sections. He hired a local contractor to build the shell, which took a year and cost just over £300,000.

By the start of last year the couple, both 48, had a structure with a roof, windows, a staircase and walls — and not much else.

They spent the rest of the year and just over £200,000 hiring individual tradesmen to finish the project, from installing the parquet flooring to plastering the walls, plumbing and fitting the three bathrooms and kitchen.

The reason for this two-part building process was partly financial. By doing without a main contractor they were able to knock 20 to 30 per cent off the cost.

It also meant they were entirely flexible. “Your thoughts evolve as you go through a project and if you have got a fixed contract it is incredibly costly to make changes,” says Oliver.

Managing a project is not for the fainthearted, or those whose jobs are not flexible. Oliver was able to take time off work for almost daily site visits while Anu, who works locally, popped in as often as she could. It was, she says, “a very intense, unpredictable time”.

Just before last Christmas the family were finally able to move into the 2,368sq ft house. The generous space allows for “extras” including a substantial coat room in the hallway that’s large enough for the whole family’s gear, plus a store room for sports kit, bikes and camping equipment.

The rest of the ground floor is taken up with a large, sprung floor studio which Anu uses for yoga classes — hammocks are strung, wall to wall, for relaxation — with its own courtyard garden. A bathroom on this level means the studio could be a fourth bedroom.

The first floor is where the family spends most of their time, in a large open-plan kitchen/living room leading out to a second, lushly planted garden terrace. Anu’s love of colour is evident in the pale green kitchen cabinets teamed with white Carrara marble worktops.

The couple have large families, so there are two tables to seat a lot of guests. Fire regulations meant there had to be doors between the living room and kitchen, so Oliver designed folding doors to tuck neatly against the wall.

Anu was keen to have a “really functional” kitchen which, in her case, meant having lower-than-average worktops as she is just under 5ft tall.

GENEROUS LANDINGS BECOME EXTRA ROOMS

The house has a central staircase and all its landings are large, allowing them to be used as open-plan rooms. The kids’ bedrooms are on the second floor and the hallway between them is big enough to act as a homework room with desks and bookshelves, as well as a music room complete with piano.

Upstairs the master bedroom has plaster-pink walls, a blue fitted headboard with built-in storage, plus an en suite bathroom and the hallway has a built-in desk, making a perfect office space.

Use every inch: built-in desk and shelves make a hallway a perfect office/study space
Charles Hosea

“If you have a generous hallway it is large enough to be a room, and the space is used really efficiently,” says Oliver. “There is no wasted circulation space.”

The master bathroom comes with twin hand basins. A step up halfway across the room divides the vanity unit, which means that Oliver at 6ft 4ins, and petite Anu, can both use the mirror at a comfortable height.

The couple invested in a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery system which sucks in fresh air from outdoors. It uses ambient heat and also keeps the home cool.

They are delighted with the results: the only heating they use is underfloor on the ground level, and the house was cool in the recent heatwave.

The property is shortlisted in two categories, including best individual house, in this year’s Brick Awards. But its greatest success, says Oliver, is that the family settled in quickly.

“Often we don’t see who inhabits the building, which is really what doing buildings is all about,” he adds. “We spent a lot of time thinking about how it would work and it was great to see how it functioned.”