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A neglected Notting Hill corner house is rebuilt from the inside out and tuned for light, flow, and all-electric living.
The Colville Conservation Area is full of picture-book façades, but step behind many of them and the plan can feel cramped and crooked. Studio Knox Bhavan inherited one of the worst—an end-of-terrace shop-house with a collapsing rear wall, uneven floors and a roof on the brink—and chose to treat the shell like a timber log: strip the bark, reveal the grain, rebuild the heart. They kept the period brickwork and renewed the oak-framed shopfront but gutted everything else, excavating a deeper basement, pouring a new back wall, and stacking a slim, lacy steel stair through four levels. That stair—open risers, oak treads—acts like a vertebra and light well, pulling daylight from a roof terrace skylight down to the kitchen two floors below.
Compact London plots often read as a warren; here the plan is a vertical glide. On entry the bay window becomes a built-in seat of oak and linen, with storage tucked beneath. A glazed bookcase gives a glimpse into a snug lined top-to-toe in oak veneer, its ceiling joists in Douglas-fir with hidden LED strips. From the snug you suddenly look down: Knox Bhavan carved a double-height void over the basement, so conversation and daylight drift between floors. Fire curtains and discreet fire-rated shelving slide shut only if alarms trigger—regulation solved without killing openness.
Material discipline keeps the rental-market brief from feeling generic. Oak threads through every room—window seats, bespoke shelving, pocket doors—while tougher surfaces take the hits: micro-concrete in bathrooms, stainless counters in the U-shaped kitchen, resin floors where footfall is highest. A high mirror above the banquette doubles perceived width; a floating basin sits in front of a frosted window; a cylindrical shower tucks beneath a new roof oculus. All heating and hot water run on electricity fed by a hidden array of PV panels and an air-source heat pump tucked behind the parapet. A battery stores surplus solar for evening use, making the house practically gas-free.
Outside, a black-decked roof terrace caps the project—a private lookout over the chimney pots of Notting Hill, structurally hung from the joists that shape the snug below. Heartwood isn’t a facelift; it’s a re-core, turning a once-dilapidated shell into 186 m² of bright, robust living space that carries its Victorian face but beats with thoroughly modern lungs. In the process Knox Bhavan demonstrates how tight sites can host generous architecture when structure, light, and sustainable systems are allowed to work in concert.
Photography © Henry Woide.
