South-London based architects Selencky Parsons won the Home Extension of the Year (over 2500 sq. ft) category in last year’s British Homes Awards with their project, The Old Apple Store. David Parsons, who alongside Sam Selencky, is a founder and director of the practice, talks merging existing with new elements, exploring material usage and some other interesting projects they are working on.
The Old Apple Store was praised for harmoniously blending the original house with a contemporary extension – can you talk me through the design?
“While a lot of the extension work we do is in London, where you're much more constrained in terms of what you can do on the size of the site. With this project, it was out in East Grinstead and had a really spacious site. The way it had previously been converted made no reference to its location, which was a wooded site with views across the countryside. And because there was a significantly sized, dilapidated greenhouse on the site, as part of an old manor house, we saw that as a good planning opportunity to design something on a decent scale. The original house is effectively three spaces, each with their own gabled roof. Those run from side to side along the site and make quite an interesting form. We took the form of the roofs and turned it 90 degrees, creating much more of an opening to the view, the light and the trees beyond. All of the key living spaces are in that new part: the kitchen, dining and living rooms. We refurbished the original house and that’s where the bedrooms, bathrooms and utility rooms are located. There was also an archway that linked the old house with the greenhouse. That essentially framed one side of a courtyard, which became fully glazed on the two other sides.
Can you talk through some material references?
“There's an eaves line that's set up on the original house that we wanted to follow through to the new extension, so that level is maintained all the way across. Then below that, we picked a brick that matched the original brick of the house as closely as possible. Above that for the roofs, we went with the zinc that referenced the darker colour of the tiled roof of the original but that was something a bit more contemporary.”
And how did the sustainability element, which includes an air source heat pump, photovoltaic panels, minimising steel use and overall cutting CO2 emissions, come to be an integral part of the project?
“The clients were very keen on making it as sustainable as possible but also in terms of how to achieve it, we presented ideas and looked at options with them. They were very supportive of looking for as many solutions as possible.”
Why did you decide to enter the British Homes Awards and what are the benefits as far as you’re concerned in entering awards such as this?
“There are quite a lot of awards and you can evaluate them by looking at the calibre of shortlisted architects and the past winners. The better awards in our view feature the kind of architects whose work we respect. Deciding to enter some awards can be a significant outlay, especially if you're a smaller practice. You want to have a sense that if you did have a chance of winning, you want it to feel quite prestigious and something you're proud of.”
What other projects are you working on?
“There are a couple of projects that are nearly finished on site. They’re both extension and house refurbishments projects: one is in Peckham, one is in Wanstead. For the latter, in terms of the use of materials, the design takes the idea of clay tiles and really runs with it, so that they are used as the roof materials and also in several different other ways. For example, we turned them on their side as a brick material to form the ground floor extension. There’s another project in Bromley we're working on, a large, detached house with a spacious extension for a family that's looking into the idea of multi-generational living, which is something we've explored a little bit in the past.”
