Urban Barn

: Jonathan Tuckey Design

Situated along a quiet grove behind the thoroughfares of West London, Urban Barn is the remodel of a formerly industrial site, stitched together from an amalgam of garages, an old carpenter’s workshop, and a central house fronting the street of two-storey Victorian cottages. The memory of a WWII bomb stitched into the fabric of the place, marking the brick continue across the three volumes of the house. Tied together by the materiality of the brickwork, the façade of the new house is given expression with handmade glazed bricks and perforated walls. Among overlooking windows and mature gardens, the house is intended to act as a refuge for its occupants - a connection to the street, a sense of solitude within the dense site.

Articulating the vestiges of old, the new additions and intersections between the three buildings are revealed as brick datums in doorway surrounds and peeled back walls in recognition of the separate fragments of the house. Throughout, the building reveals itself as a series of intriguing moments. The interior brings together a collection of archetypal domestic spaces - the room, landing, courtyard, porch, bay, nook, gallery, garret, cloister, perron stair, privy, library, chapel, barn, light house, gallery, workshop, attic, threaded across three buildings. Linked to a memory of the archetype of these spaces, expressing a range of lightness and darkness. Housing the display objects and art collections, the spaces were crafted to reveal, extend and expose nooks, walls and openings forming a series of gallery-like spaces throughout the house.