With this Hampstead house project in north London, Belgian architect Hans Verstuyft has brought back the soul of a listed 17th-century cottage that had lost its original interior. By reimagining memories of the past with reclaimed materials and characterful objects, the new design casts an ambiguity over what is new or old: ‘We reinvented something that was never there,’ he says.
Tour this Hampstead house project by Hans Verstuyft
The cottage is located in the grounds of Grove Lodge, the home of Spanish designer Celia Muñoz (founder of children’s clothing label La Coqueta), her husband and their five children. The main house adjoins the storied Admiral's House painted by John Constable and once home to renowned 19th-century architect George Gilbert Scott. With lots of visiting family and friends, they required a comfortable guest house as a seamless annex and antidote to their busy lives.
In this charming historical context, the exterior of the cottage and its four pitched roofs were restored intact, yet the interior has a new soft modernity. Verstuyft shifted the kitchen into a curved extension, where more windows were added to open up views to the garden. Here, the sculptural stone and wood fit-out is ‘more like an object or a nice piece of furniture than a kitchen’ with little ‘stone tablets’ embedded in the walls for shelves. Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, each with its own unique bathroom with different coloured stone sinks.
For the interior architecture, Verstuyft carefully chose patinated reclaimed materials that had already lived a long life, to ‘breathe history into the cottage’ – terracotta tiles, reclaimed oak beams, and stone from the steps of an old castle in Belgium, many of which he found an Antwerp reclamation warehouse. This part of his approach is deeply connected to sustainability, considering not only re-use, but longevity, in the cultivation of timeless spaces that are both modern and grounded in the past.
Curated objects, from vintage furniture, to art and even bed linen, were all taken care of and the result of an ‘intensive search’. The rule was that ‘nothing could look the same’ and the colour palette was inspired by the work of surrealist Giorgio Morandi.
There’s a dynamic ‘Seven’ blue chair by Mart Van Schijndel; the leather ‘Seal’ lounge chair by Ib Kofod Larsen; and a coffee table by artist Carsten in der Elst. Bespoke elements such as the sofa, dining table and ‘SpotOn’ brass lights were designed in-house at Hans Verstuyft Architecten, as well as the open shelving systems that form simple, dimensional frames for personal pieces and new memories to come.
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