A House within a House

Built in 1878 by Willaim Willet, 27 Belsize Crescent was a large end of terrace townhouse that formed the last part of a speculative crescent. The decadent classical design was deemed unfashionable & by 1901 the house was turned into a boarding house. In the 1970s it was further divided into several flats, one per floor. This conversion stripped the original house of its ornamentation & features, presumably for ease of maintenance, whilst subdividing the original bipartite plan of front & rear reception rooms into a tripartite arrangement with the addition of new metal framed windows in gable wall. The house was now Victorian in vertical proportion & Modern in horizontal. The client approached the practice to convert two of the flats, which they had recently purchased, into a single home.