Primrose Hill is a northwest London neighborhood famous for its topography — the hill offers skyline views — and envy-producing, village-like charm. The district has Georgian- and Victorian-era terrace houses and many leafy trees. But even locals may not know of a little street that wends through it like a country lane.
Klaartje Quirijns, 56, a filmmaker, and Hannes Witteveen, 55, a lawyer, once counted themselves among the ignorant. For a decade, the pair, who are Dutch, lived with their two daughters around the corner from that lane without having a clue that it was there or that their future home sat on it.
But as Ms. Quirijns once said in an interview, “All my films arise from the same question: ‘What are the deceptive worlds we don’t get to see?’”
The house they would buy in 2020 — after a lifetime of renting, they hungered to be homeowners — was an odd duck among the preening architecture. Square, flat-topped and brick, it looked like a baby bunker.
And yet the interior of the 100-year-old building was lofty, and Ms. Quirijns had a general aversion to low ceilings and small windows. The stingy fenestrations of English houses struck her as particularly odd, she said, “as if people thought we need to deprive them of light.”
She also had an ace up her sleeve in the person of Winka Dubbeldam. Ms. Dubbeldam is a Dutch-born architect whose New York City firm, Archi-Tectonics, contorts concrete, metal, wood and glass into habitable sculptures. (The studio’s latest monograph is called “Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things.”)
Ms. Quirijns met Ms. Dubbeldam through a mutual friend while the filmmaker was living in New York in the aughts. For a while, she trailed the architect with a camera as Ms. Dubbeldam worked on a crystalline addition to a loft building in SoHo. But Ms. Quirijns is best known for raw subjects like war, fascism and family trauma. She refocused her energies on making a documentary about a Brooklyn roofer running guns to independence fighters in Kosovo and then one about three men who fought to bring the African dictator Hissène Habré to justice.
The Primrose Hill house gave the women another chance to meet on common ground. And although the building was small (about 800 square feet), the project was not. The house needed abundant light, augmented space, a better sense of harmony with the streetscape, where it sat between its neighbors like a wart — and, above all, permission to make alterations from the local regulatory board, which was famously sniffy.
Ms. Dubbeldam proposed a third-floor zinc-and-glass addition to the two-story brick structure. After a year of pandemic-era delays, a historic-preservation official finally responded to the initial iteration, rejecting it because it seemed out of character in the neighborhood.
Not a problem, Ms. Dubbeldam replied, picking up a pen and redrawing the glassy cantilever projecting over the adjacent carport in her scheme so that it was bigger and squarer, with a sidelong view down the lane. Here was a bay window echoing the others on the street.
At that point, she recalled, the official had no other choice but to approve the proposal: “I think he felt like, ‘Well, I did ask for that.’”
The addition, which looks like a mansard roof from the front and contributed to a total floor area of about 1,600 square feet, created a more elegant visual connection between the building and its neighbors. But as striking as the facade is, Ms. Dubbeldam saved most of the drama for the interior, angling and piercing the walls and roofs to introduce oblique shafts of light. These are seen most notably in the diva of the scheme: an open, elliptical steel staircase that forms a luminous spiral.
In a video conversation, Ms. Dubbeldam and Ms. Quirijns — glamorous women with bone structures that could have been molded by divine CAD software (Ms. Dubbeldam has appeared in magazine and television ads, and Ms. Quirijns was offered modeling work in her younger years) — described the building’s program.
The ground floor belongs to the daughters in the family: Roxanne, 23, who is entering a master’s program in English literature, and Nina, 20, who studies architecture. The back of this level was extended to incorporate a piece of the yard. A glass roof — Ms. Dubbeldam described it as a “transparent seam” — covers the new hallway, delivering light to the common area and shared bathroom. But the architect said she feared that the sisters’ bedrooms remained murky.
“Oh, they love it. They love it. They love it,” Ms. Quirijns reassured her.
On the second floor is a double-height living room with the gridded “bay window.” Not only was this free-flowing area extended 10 feet sideways above the carport, but it was also nudged three feet over the backyard to capture additional space.
Apart from the splendid architectural features (see: staircase), there is not much decoration. Ms. Quirijns said she was inspired by the spare interiors in the three Michelangelo Antonioni films known as the “trilogy on modernity and its discontents.” Her only requirements were a Camaleonda sofa — a low, plush 1970s-era lounge — and a painting by a young Scottish artist named Harrison Armstrong, showing two men in black looking through a plate-glass window to a smoking factory. The painting reminded her of the petrochemical plant in another beloved Antonioni movie, “Red Desert.”
The mood shifts in the primary bedroom, with its custom wood bookshelves and exposed brick. When bedrooms were apportioned in the new layout, it made sense for them to be in the original building and wrapped in the existing masonry, so that they were cozy and soundproof, Ms. Dubbeldam said.
The third floor is the brightest, no small credit to the glass insertions in the zinc envelope that folds around it. From here, the trees on the narrow lane make their presence so palpable that the home feels like an “inside-out greenhouse,” in Ms. Dubbeldam’s words. On the terrace carved from the mansard are an olive tree and pots of lavender wafting Mediterranean charm.
This aerie is where the family gravitates for meals, socializing and homework. The Valcucine kitchen, with its pyramidal skylight, has a black marble counter — hell to maintain, Ms. Quirijns conceded, but worth the stains. The volcanic rock pendant lamps in the kitchen and dining area are by David Pompa, a designer in Mexico City, who also supplied the stairwell chandelier.
The house is warmed with radiant floor heating and a gas fireplace (vertical, so it fits in the living room). Solar roof collectors offset much of the energy needs and supply juice to the Tesla Powerwall.
The original property cost about $2.08 million; renovations came to about $865 a square foot.
Ms. Quirijns said she required some adjustment to write at home in such a serene environment. “I used to work always in very chaotic cafes, and I needed noise and lots of people around me to concentrate,” she said.
Now she thrives in the hush.
“When I’m woken up, it’s really by birds,” she said. “It’s just incredible in the middle of London.”
Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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