Private Gallery & Music Pavilion

Client: Art collector and family
Engineer: Techniker
Photographer: Ioana Marinescu

This home on the edge of London has been owned and occupied by the same family for three generations. The current family members had found themselves squeezed out by the growing number of art pieces they had been collecting over the years. Because of the strong family connection to the house, the clients were determined not to move and appointed SPA to come up with a scheme to accommodate the art work as well as their existing music room, a separate building constructed in the 1960s sitting in their lower rear garden.

SPA’s proposal was a new modern pavilion with garden terrace on lower garden with a new glazed library and gallery ‘link’ that connected the new pavilion to the original house at the top of the garden. The rear extension opens onto a terrace and overlooks a wooded garden beyond. The steel and structural glass pavilion, facilitated by Techniker Engineers, is wrapped in cedar. The crystalline gallery ‘link’, full of natural light, remembers a childhood route down through the garden, flowers growing to eye level on one side over neatly stacked books in shelves (fitted joinery) that actually act as insulation in the wall. A simple interlocking construct full of bonds with the past, whilst being definitively modern.