Private House - Schneider Designers

Private House

Our clients required an extension to their house in Hampstead to accommodate an expanding collection of wines and extend the social and family areas of the house. Since the house sits on a relatively compact plot it was decided to excavate a basement extension over the whole footprint of the house and part of the front and rear gardens to achieve the required space for a new dining room, family and play room, lounge, kitchen, gym and cellar . The brief was refined with the clients to create a new focal space for entertaining guests: a glass enclosed cellar wrapping around in a theatrical manner around the dining room. Three carefully located lightwells illuminate the different rooms and provide exterior amenity space while minimising the visual intrusion of the new extension into the streetscape. The extension is linked into the intelligent lighting and audiovisual systems of the house and the main stairs of the house were extended onto the basement to create a seamless transition between the existing house and the thoroughly contemporary new addition.