Video house tour: Weston Street SE1
Architect: Simon Allford of AHMM
Developer: Solidspace
Awards: RIBA London Award 2018, RIBA National Award 2018, World Architecture Festival 2018 Small Scale Housing Award
Photos by Rory Gardiner
Weston Street house tour video
Hi everyone, my name is Gus Zogolovitch and I run Rare Space. We’re an agency interested in new amazing design-led homes, and we decided that we’d put together a few reviews of spaces that we really love. Spaces that we’re involved with or not involved with, things that architects have built around town, and maybe out of town, that we think you might be interested in seeing.
So we thought today we’d start with a building that my father Roger Zogolovitch has just built and designed by Simon Allford of AHMM.
It’s 8 flats, and some office space, framed by the Shard and Guy’s Hospital, which gives you a clue as to where we are, close to London Bridge and close to Bermondsey.
It’s a rather amazing set of flats, loved by the people who are in them, and we’ve got the rare opportunity to go and have a look inside.
This is a development called Weston Street, built by Solidspace. The interesting thing here is around split levels, and one of the interesting things about split levels is that you’ve got multiple door entries.
The lower entry door comes into the master bedroom, and it allows people to come and go without having to disturb somebody else. Potentially this is good for guests, or if you’ve got teenagers that like going out late at night.
The other thing to point out is this interesting board marked concrete. Now this has an effect of these lines, which were formed by individual planks of wood. There are circular holes called tie holes, and that’s how they bring the concrete together, when they use the form work to shutter it. It creates a very interesting effect and a lovely backdrop.
As it happens, my own house has concrete in it and I love it because when my kids bash something against it, it’s their head that gets hurt rather than my wall.
We are now in the start of what Solidspace call the split level Solidspace DNA and they’ve come up with a name which they call Live Work Eat, with this being the Live. It’s a lovely space, with a double height ceiling, concrete everywhere but offset nicely by this oak which I really like, because too much concrete is never good for anyone.
This is a pretty nice kitchen, with a sort of hand made worktop which is very durable, nicely thought through with some grooves there so you don’t get everything sitting there in the water piling up. A wine cooler if that happens to be your thing, some nice cupboards which do the whole soft close which is always good, nice big recycling drawer, lots of storage, and a proper fridge.
The ceiling has track lighting, which is interesting because you can plug in whatever kind of lights you like, and they just plug straight in, you don’t have to wire them, it’s all wired up it’s all ready to go. You can have spots point at the table, or you can have hanging lights. Gives you the flexibility that is something that’s kind of important to all of us I think.
So we’ve seen the live, we’ve seen the eat, and we’re about to go into the work.
The interesting thing about this split level is that actually this is all open plan, but because of these little level changes everything feels just that much further apart and that much bigger. And everyone gets a bit more privacy to do what they want to do.
So you could have people in the living room, and easily you could be doing some work and kind of tuning them out. It helps if you’re a little bit deaf like me but even not, it still works.
One other thing to point out is the floor, a very elegant oak parquet floor. Solid oak, because my father has it in his head that engineered oak is really bad. And this is all under floor heated. It’s nice to have some solidity beneath your feet, or so he says.
So that was Weston Street, I hope you enjoyed the tour. If you’d like to see even more, please click to watch the video. If you like it please let us know, give us some feedback on what you liked, what you didn’t like. We will be trying to do a few more homes over the next few months.
If you’ve got an interesting home you’d like us to come and see let us know
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