Stone & Steel House is a minimalist residence located in London, United Kingdom, designed by DGN Studio. Working with minimal external space, DGN Studio has looked to the sky in their transformation of a Highbury home for a fashion designer, medical research fellow, and their young family. Employing a stone-brick ground-floor extension capped in a lightweight stainless-steel glazed roof, the house remains grounded in its earthy London-brick context while always looking upwards to the changing skies.
The material language consists of earthy tones and textures for the lower levels of the house, which become lighter and more refined upon ascending to the upper levels. Thick stone, clay, and lime plaster create a soft and grainy backdrop to spaces on the ground floor, which then evolve into fine and carefully detailed metalwork as stairs are scaled. This conceptual language was developed in collaboration with friend of the studio Sarah Izod, a creative director in experiential art, demonstrating how architectural materiality can express vertical hierarchy where textural and chromatic transitions establish spatial sequence and experiential progression through building section.
DGN Studio materialized this approach into built forms which exploit the potential for tall, top-lit spaces, elevating the daily rituals of cooking, gathering, and retreat which were central to their clients’ brief. Splashes of Yves Klein blue in sofas, stools, and furnishings form inviting pools of intensity amongst the neutral textures and tones. The existing house had a small kitchen with low ceilings and poor connection to a tight, north-facing garden. With little external space to sacrifice, the studio proposed the most minimal depth of rear extension, allowing the kitchen to increase in size proportionally to the rest of the house while preserving the garden as a secluded external room.
A side infill extension was formed for dining where, without the ability to extend back, the designers saw an opportunity to push upwards, creating a double-height space that achieves a sense of grandeur that is both unexpected and delightful. A band of stainless-steel framed clerestory windows at high level generates the atmosphere of a grand hall on the footprint of a picnic blanket. This vertical expansion strategy demonstrates how constrained urban sites can achieve spatial generosity through ceiling height rather than floor area, creating volume and light penetration impossible within conventional single-story extensions.
An external palette of sandstone bricks and site-cast concrete sills and lintels gives these new volumes a robust presence. At low level the stone bricks are cut with a split-face, forming a rusticated base that anchors the volumes to the ground. The sandblasted finish of the stone bricks above begins the refinement that continues upwards to ground-back concrete and then fine metalwork. The stone bricks were an opportunity to reduce the carbon impact of the scheme, replacing previously specified carbon-intensive clay bricks. Paired alongside a fully breathable wall construction of hemp insulation, wood-wool board linings, and lime plaster internally, this was an opportunity to explore the expressive potential of a more responsible form of construction.
