Most of us are susceptible to curious compulsions as we age. Some run marathons, climb mountains or enroll in gruelling physical feats of another flavour. Others write the big novel.
But if you’re an architect? It’s all about the self-build.
In 2015 Will Burges was residing quite happily in a Sixties house on the Dulwich Estate with his wife, Sam, a studio manager, and their two young children.
He suspects his 31/44 Architects co-founder Stephen Davies, by then a self-build veteran, had something to do with the siren call. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, he’s doing his third one, I should at least have a go’. But I wasn’t really thinking that it would come off.”
Both were well versed in the acquisition of scrappy oddments of land, from old garages to side returns. Davies had turned the pursuit of these pockets into an art form, tracking the hundreds of hopeful letters he’d directed to London letterboxes in a dizzying spreadsheet.
Several years earlier Burges had clocked a Fifties house in nearby Crystal Palace with a particularly generous side garden. “I plucked up the courage to write this one letter — and amazingly, they replied and said they’d consider it,” he says.
This was 2015, and the owners of said letterbox had grown restless after several requests to build a sizable extension on their wraparound corner plot had been denied. Conversations continued for a couple of years as Burges drew up plans for an ambitious family home that would draw on decades of practice, on travel memories, on buildings he’d known and loved.
He secured consent before buying the plot, in a chicken-and-egg style deal that relied upon the neighbours upping sticks.
“They didn’t know whether they’d ship out of London, or perhaps buy a flat by the seaside. In the end they spotted a house over the road that was up for sale and said, ‘Right — you’re going to have to buy the plot now’.”
The house, which was completed in 2021, is quite strikingly in step with its Fifties neighbours.
But with a slab of dark green marble by the front door, it is also rich in what Burges calls “civic luxury”. That is the idea that buildings have a duty to put their best face — or façade — forward, giving something back to the street in an act of architectural generosity.
Whether it’s a Venetian palazzo or a family home in suburban south London — it’s the same principle.
The frontage obscures a clever trick. There’s a twist in the centre of the plan, which creates “quite deep, layered sight lines” between rooms, and a glazed protrusion of a kitchen with a glorious green outlook.
On one side, rainwater is funnelled towards an enormous protected sycamore at the centre of a woodland garden (the house sits lightly on a series of steel screw piles positioned to avoid its roots). Looking south, a sun-trap resilient garden is planted in a naturalistic style with insect-friendly species.
Remarkably, the couple had managed to buy another slice of land from a one-bedroom flat on the street behind them. “Finding the original plot was our first fluke. Snaffling the extra bit was our second.”
The house is loosely Scandinavian in character, with swathes of simple oiled spruce that did helpful things for the budget.
“I like the 1950s English brutalist stuff, when brutalism was the Smithsons and not just the South Bank and mega concrete,” says Burges. “They talked about ‘the woodiness of the wood’ — this very direct and honest use of materials, with things coming together really simply.”
The inner lining is cheap, painted brick; deep skirting contains the plumbing and services.
“There was a time about 10 or 15 years ago when we were building all sorts of twiddly bits of tech into houses but then so quickly they became obsolete. We’re more analogue in our approach. You get up, you press the light switch. We didn’t want three apps to control the lighting.”
What it cost
⬤ Site: £400,000
⬤ Foundations and utilities: £122,000
⬤ Watertight shell and above-ground works: £225,000
⬤ Plumbing, electrical and heat pump: £55,000
⬤ Internal finishes: £80,000
⬤ External works: £8,000
⬤ Professional fees: £10,000
TOTAL: £900,000
Most of the doors downstairs can be bolted into the concrete, thus doing a kind of disappearing act that facilitates seasonal whims. “Things can be loose and open and then we can close down in the winter and they can just be really contained and snug and warm.” It is, Burges says, not unlike an old pub, with its rhythm of open and intimate spaces.
This is one of many references that Burges reels off with ease, though he is clear that he didn’t set out to have “a bit of this and a bit of that”: a dash of California case study house, a drop of English farmhouse.
“I think as an architect you accumulate baggage of things you’ve known and loved. I’d start drawing the zig-zag bricks for the angled façade and realise it was a wall from the Louisiana art museum in Denmark.”
The connection to the gardens is faintly reminiscent of Peter Aldington’s modernist Turn End, to which Burges paid a formative visit as a fresh graduate. “I remember drinking tea with this lovely old architect, thinking, ‘This house is nuts’. It really stuck with me.”
The design is bottom-heavy, with two modest bedrooms upstairs and a roof space that Burges had imagined lined with books but has now been conceded to their son.
The house is, in fact, hardly bigger than their old one: “It’s just a better use of space.”
So would it have been different if he had designed it 10 years ago? “Absolutely. I’m not comfortable with the idea that an architect building their own house can create this perfect image of everything they’re interested in — because that evolves. For the liveliest and most interesting architect, that can evolve fairly radically.”
To his eye, it’s still a work in progress.
A simple concrete frame means none of the walls is load bearing, so the cupboards that line the corridor could one day be a set of glazed doors, say.
The joinery was inspired by the DIY ethos of Italian designer Enzo Mari, and can largely be unscrewed, then moved or reconfigured. Burges likes the idea of building a glazed garden room off the southerly lounge, once the kids have grown tired of their trampoline.
He is resolute that he is a one-and-done self-builder. And anyway, this house will never be finished — simply fine-tuned as the family grows. All of the walls were painted white, partly as a defence against decision paralysis, so only now, three years on, are they starting to think about colour.
“It’s a slow inhabitation.”
