The glass mansion

The glass mansion (original article)

Anne Ashworth reports on the team behind a startling £6m contemporary home

REDINGTON ROAD in Hampstead is not the sort of street you associate with contemporary architectural styles. Until this year the most modern house on this exclusive North London avenue was a postwar prefab, an incongruous sight among the sleek, mostly Edwardian or neo-Edwardian eight-bedroomed mansions. This glossy sameness increases the shock to the senses of the just-completed glass-fronted two-floor house, built by Kearsley, a London firm of developers, that now stands at No 6½ Redington Road. Next week the property goes on the market for £6 million through TK International, coinciding with the beginning of Architecture Week, the annual event that seeks to highlight the best in design.

Proposals for the Redington Road house, built on the site where an undistinguished bungalow formerly stood, appear to have met with little resistance from the neighbours. They are obviously not the same slightly scary locals who so assertively drive their big 4x4s with blacked-out windows down the leafy road that leads from Hampstead Heath in the direction of the smart shops of Hampstead village.

The 4,300-sq-ft house – at the road’s hipper, village end – was a collaboration between Kearsley and a group of contractors and creatives. Sometimes there have been as many as 30 working on the site, running up a bill for fees and wages that helps to explain why the guide price for the property is £6 million. This is a project that even has its own mascot – Bo, the dog that belongs to Matthew Frayne, one of the partners in Kearsley. John McAslan, the architect, was responsible for the original design; this was modified and added to by Matt Brumby and Trevor Roche, from Pennington Phillips, another firm of architects. The contractors (hiraconstruction) were Hira Govind and his sons, Paresh and Neil; Jono Wolf, from Mr Wolf, devised the interior decor and Charlotte Rowe designed the garden.

Together they have built a latterday mansion, complete with every upmarket gadget to appeal to a multimillionaire conversant with the edgiest brands such as Viabizzuno lights and Boffi and Toscoquattro fittings. Why would any wealthy person go to the trouble of assembling a team to deliver a bespoke property and become involved in tricky issues such as which Gaggenau oven to choose when the whole troublesome task can be outsourced to the likes of Kearsley?

On the day that I visited the project a month ago the property was still a work in progress; features such as the Chameleon multi-room hi-fi, lighting and video distribution system had not been fully installed. Damien Kearsley, Kearsley’s managing director, became concerned when he saw two decorators applying the wrong colour of paint to one of the four bedrooms on the ground floor. His enthusiasm for the enterprise was evident as he proudly displayed the recently delivered Boffi handbasins for the limestone and basalt wetrooms that adjoin each of the bedrooms. The master bedroom on the first floor also has its own bathroom. This complex is situated behind the double-height light-filled living room and the kitchen (more Boffi, lots of Gaggenau).

From floating mezzanine floor above the living room, we watched the craftsmen builders work on the fireplace, although “fireplace” does not fully convey the scale of this piece of sculpture that extends to the ceiling of this double-height room. “Monolith” would be a better description of the stark concrete structure designed by Darkroom Architecture, whose other clients include Sir Elton John (his once florid decorating style has now veered to the minimalist).

The monolith theme continues in the garden. Charlotte Rowe’s design includes lots of architectural blocks – “cubes that echo the design of the fireplace”, says Frayne. Team Kearsley and Bo are now packing up to go on to the next of the company’s four other projects in Hampstead – which may now start to become associated with the latest in contemporary architectural styles.