Creer House, Isleworth

The project’s clients were a couple with two young children, looking to rework the congested rooms of their home to create generous living spaces where cooking and play might coexist. The family occupied the interwar house for a number of years before appointing the architects Thom Brisco and James Alder, then collaborating as Alder Brisco.

The house’s original plan was arranged with the larger living spaces lining the western party wall, and with secondary circulatory spaces set to the east. In recognition of this established pattern, the realised scheme unifies a reworked plan with the extension’s massing, fenestration, and garden design.

The massing is lifted to the west to create a generous dining space with a tall sliding door and roof light. Beyond this threshold a brick terrace forms broad steps, flanked by planters, where the family sit to rest in the sun. The extension drops in height to the east with a glazed door providing swift access to the garden and regular steps dropping to garden level. A gateway and wall form the third mass in this tumble of masonry forms toward the garden.

The new room adopts the common fletton bricks of the original house to build both internal and external walls, while flush stacked concrete lintels and copings are left exposed throughout. Notched timber joists and a plywood deck complete the stepped soffit of the scheme internally.

The line of the original rear façade today marks a soft threshold between the kitchen and dining spaces with two steps beginning a gentle fall toward the garden. The full width brick terrace completes the journey, with its integrated planters sandwiching the dining space between the greens of the simple panelled kitchen and the growing garden.