15º Off-White House
15º Off-White House
Exploring how a conventional dwelling can be dramatically opened up and adapted for the lifestyle of a young family, this remodelled house in Holland Park expresses and consolidates Paul McAneary Architects formal, material and organisational preoccupations.
The traditional cellular floor plans of London’s historic housing stock do not reflect the changing tenor of modern family life, from rigid social and physical compartmentalisation to a more informal and outgoing dynamic.
Here, internal partition walls are removed to create a seamless, fluid sweep of space from the entrance to the garden. A specially designed faceted ceiling channels natural light into the long, deep plan. Reflected off cool white surfaces, light washes through the house, transforming and animating space.
The staircase connecting the new open plan ground floor with the two upper storeys is a dramatic tour de force of structure and materials. Enclosed by wafer thin glass balustrades and seemingly dropped, like the staircase leading to an aircraft from a cut in the ceiling, it has an exquisite, crafted precision. Focusing intently on a set piece element is typical of Paul McAneary Architects approach and here it assumes a special resonance, like a piece of sculpture poised within the calm, white space.
In the absence of partition walls, the stair acts to demarcate functions, for instance defining the living and kitchen areas from the dining space. Ample storage in bespoke units is both practical and elegant, keeping rooms free of clutter and enhancing the feeling of light, luxurious spaciousness. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Contract Value £150k
Location Holland Park, London
Client Private
Date 2007 – 2008
Area 145m²
Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
Design Service From design concept to detailed design to the end of construction, interior design, lighting design, glazing design, survey, planning, 3D visualisation
Main Contractor Typhoon
Supplier Farrow & Ball, Mint, Ikea, The Plank Co, Concept-Tiles
Press 2011 Objekt Magazine, December 2011, Maria Jose F. Prados, ‘Rehabilitacion en blanco de Paul McAneary Architects, Interiores Minimalistas, 3 February 2011, Katy Dunn, ’Smart Storage Solutions’, Grand Designs Magazine, January 2011 2010 ‘Keeping it Simple’, Designer Magazine, December 2010, Jamie Derringer, ‘15° Off-White House in the UK by Paul McAneary Architects’, Design Milk, 12 December 2010, Alessia Pincini, ‘Paul McAneary Architects’, abitare.it, 26 October 2010, ’15º Off White House;, WAN Interiors, 17 September 2010 2009 Claudia Baille, ‘Small Space Style’, Living Etc, February 2009, Andy Buck, ‘Step by Step’, Grand Designs, February 2009
Symantec
Symantec
US firm Symantec is a global leader in cyber security software. This speculative project for extending its European headquarters explores the concept of wrapping the existing building in a sinuous membrane supported by a timber structure.
Enlarging the building in this way creates new spaces both around and within it. The modular flexibility of the lightweight membrane can define and enclose areas for many different kinds of functions, for instance, communal dining, breakout and socialising spaces.
Economical to construct, the fluidly contoured addition counterpoints the existing orthogonal volume, expressing a compelling new architectural and corporate identity. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Contract Value £ 6.5M
Location Maidstone, England
Client Kenmore Property Group Ltd
Date 2008
Area 30,000m²
Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
Design Service
Main Contractor N/A
Sub Contractor
Beach House, Davenport Road
Beach House, Davenport Road
The immemorial relationship between sea and shore is explored in this project for a weekend beach house on the south coast of England near Bognor Regis. The clients commissioned a large retreat for entertaining and enjoying the sybaritic delights of seaside life. The imposing, three-storey dwelling steps down to take advantage of a wonderful synthesis of light and views, creating a series of terraces and decks like an ocean liner in full sail.
Spatial organisation is carefully calibrated around the routines of entertaining, sailing and bathing, both in the sea and in the house’s specially-designed swimming pool. Ample car parking and three guest bedrooms accommodate weekend visitors, who are greeted on entry by a spectacular triple-height atrium designed to bring light down into the plan. The main living area is elevated on a first floor piano nobile as a fluid, open-plan space bounded by a huge glass wall overlooking the sea, dissolving the boundary between nature and artifice.
Floors are logically divide according to front and back-of-house functions. Services areas and a boat house are placed on the shore side, with bedrooms and living spaces facing the sea. Details such as a changing and decompression space to prevent sand from being brought into the house, a staircase that acts as a windbreak and a secure plant room that can still be accessed when the owners are away, are all thoughtful responses to the seaside milieu.
Together, they contrive to enhance and elevate the concept of a vacation house in both practical and experiential terms. Though at present the project remains unbuilt, the ideas that informed it fed through into a subsequent scheme for a beach house in Carmel, California. [By Catherine Slessor*]
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Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
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Arkwright Road
Arkwright Road
A simple lateral living conversion of a top floor flat in Hampstead deftly extends the space available and creates a light filled eyrie for a young French couple. In a common London pattern, the original flat was an unimaginative conversion of the top floor of a house.
The cramped, cellular arrangement has been replaced by a clean open plan, incorporating living, dining and kitchen in a single, fluid volume. A master bedroom is supplemented by a micro-bedroom to provide space for guests
Integrated storage units tactfully strip rooms of clutter and cunning spatial geometry contrives to make things seem bigger than they really are. A staircase connects with a roof terrace, opening up the external realm.
An alternating tread arrangement makes efficient use of the available space and a slim glazed balustrade adds an elegant touch. The contract was completed within a three month timeframe and to streamline communication with the builders, all information was contained within a single drawing.
[By Catherine Slessor*]
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Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
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Chariot Oil and Gas
Chariot Oil and Gas
Chariot Oil and Gas is an hydrocarbon exploration company headquartered in London’s Old Bond Street. This remodelling of their Mayfair premises rationalises the existing historic building while adding a series of new elements.
Alluding to the geological strata revealed in oil and gas exploration, subtly striated layers of stone add visual and textural interest to the interiors. As an explicit and poetic expression of Paul McAneary Architects’s concern with materials or ‘substance’ this also has other resonances – the capacity to endure, to be authentic, to lasting, to be timeless, age with grace and use, suffused with a pervading sense of weight and rigour.
Illuminated in a way that dramatically highlights the texture of the stone, the panels form a compelling intervention, powerfully emblematic of the transformation of the interior. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Contract Value Private
Location Mayfair, London
Client Chariot Oil & Gas Ltd
Date 2010
Area 276m²
Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
Supplier Direct Stone, Detail Lighting
PMA Font
PMA Font
Informed by an innate understanding of business branding and identity, Paul’s McAneary’s fascination with typographic design led to the development of the PMA font. Featuring a reduced number of strokes and the removal of all extraneous embellishments, it is a truly minimal and distinctive piece of graphic design employed for all PMA’s corporate communications. The elegant, curvaceous, sans-serif font perfectly embodies the practice’s interest in the abstraction and refinement of minimalism, yet is also characterised by a warmer, more human aesthetic. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Dyson Washroom
Dyson Washroom
Paul McAneary Architects won a competition held by technology company Dyson to devise a design for the washroom of the future. Clean-lined and minimal, employing natural materials, it reflects Paul McAneary Architects’s skill in creating a calm, sensual atmosphere for the daily routines of personal care. Yet it is also ergonomically efficient and ultra hygienic.
The arrangement of fittings means that users do not actually touch them, so eliminating the potential for the transfer of bacteria. Synthesising technology with aesthetics, Dyson’s distinctive Airblade hand dryer is set in a specially designed wooden cabinet characterised by its elegant joinery. Such attention to detail is typical of Paul McAneary Architects’s approach, investing even the smallest project with rigour and refinement. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Client Dyson
Date 2010
Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
Awards 2010 BD Dyson Airblade Washroom Competition, 2011 Shortlisted Young Architect of the Year
Eco Finity Screen Spa-th
Eco Finity Screen Spa-th
A key aspect of Paul McAneary Architects’s work focuses on design and product development, reconceptualising elements and components from the standpoints of performance, appearance and experience. The design of an apparently simple element such as a bath can contribute enormously to the experience of bathing, stimulating the senses and heightening feelings of pleasure. Water interacts with the body in a particular way and a well-designed bathroom constitutes a tranquil, healthful refuge from the cares of everyday life.
The concept for Paul McAneary Architects’s ‘Eco Finity Screen Spa-th’ is based on sustainable design in terms of water consumption, energy use and recycling. At the same time, it explores a language of ergonomic efficiency and elegant refinement, in keeping with Paul McAneary Architects’s signature aesthetic of sensual, modern minimalism. The aim is to develop a radical new kind of bathtub underscored by sensitivity to function and the quest for pure form, rather than be driven by a predetermined style.
Conceived in response to a design competition staged by German manufacturer Kaldewei, Paul McAneary Architects devised a luxurious infinity bathtub that incorporates an LED display for use as a computer or TV screen. Incorporated within the walls of the tub it can be raised and lowered through an innovative hydraulic system, activated by the tap of a hand. Originally developed by the military, the screen’s TOLED technology is based on frameless, toughened and laminated glass in four sections. Within the layers an integrated, invisible woven metal mesh heats up the screen to prevent condensation on its surface. It also holds the glass in place if it should be damaged.
The elegant, frameless glass screen is divided into four sub-screens that can be combined into a single 360 degree display, offering the potential to watch a film while keeping track of the news or stock market developments. An advanced sound system controlled through integrated WIFI technology is linked to speakers recessed into the bathroom ceiling. The screen can also be used as a light source for illumination to conjure different atmospheres, and its healing qualities can play a role in mental and physical therapy.
Sybaritic delight is tempered with an attention to detail and an ecological reponsiveness. The silky smooth steel enamel surface has a self-cleaning finish. An integrated overflow detail creates a seductive, infinity pool effect, familiar in high-end swimming pools, but here ingeniously reprised and adapted for a domestic context. The overflow is collected in a tank below the bathtub, until it is filtered and recycled in the WC. An integrated water filter pumps and prepares the water for recycling. The tank also acts as a heat reservoir, storing embodied energy, so that the bath maintains an even temperature for longer, with less hot water required to keep it topped up.
Today, bathing extends beyond the basic requirements of hygiene and is elevated into a ritual of comfort and relaxation, infusing body and mind with a feeling of wellness. Through its pioneering and sensual design, the Eco Finity Screen Spa-th takes this to a dynamic new level. [By Catherine Slessor*]
Date 2011
Design Team Paul McAneary Architects
Faceted House 2
Faceted House 2
An early project that further explores the faceted facade plan form. Our first Faceted House 1 later influenced Faceted House 3.