See that yellow bucket,” says Jemima Garthwaite, pointing to a photograph on her screen. “Every time I had a shower or washed my hands in the bathroom, I’d have to come downstairs, carry it outside and pour it down a drain in the garden.” We are flicking through a folder of images called “During”, as Garthwaite recalls the gruelling process of renovating and extending her home in east London. The bucket sat under a waste pipe in the middle of what is now her kitchen. “It went on for weeks. That was the least fun element of living here.”
“And this – believe it or not – is when the builders left.” She shows me a sorry image of the kitchen extension: unplastered, unfurnished, unfinished. “I’d run out of money. I had to do the rest myself.” Garthwaite trained as an architect (“the most over-glamourised industry ever”), so she had a clear sense of what needed doing. Even so, it took her four years to finish what the builders had started. “I worked evenings and weekends. I’d even come home during my lunch break to chisel for half an hour.”
When Garthwaite bought the house seven years ago it was a small two-up, two-down Victorian terrace with a dog-leg kitchen. The previous owners had kept many of the original features and managed to legally double the size of the garden by “squatting” an unused patch of land behind the property for years. With such generous outside space, it made sense for Garthwaite to add a full-width extension to the ground floor.
At the time, her friend Tom Kaneko was living with her. He specialises in small-scale residential projects. Together, they started to think about what that extension might look like. Garthwaite – who is the founder and director of the creative agency This Here – would spend her lunch breaks with a roll of tracing paper, perfecting the floorplan, which she would take home and share with Kaneko.
Natural light became a major preoccupation. With every full-width extension, there is a risk that the centre of the house – the room that connects the old with the new – becomes dark and uninhabitable. To overcome this, Kaneko introduced the idea of an interior garden that would pool light on three sides. But this proved too expensive. “It was cheaper to have one roof light than three walls, so the space is now used as a bright office.” A further two roof lights, bi-fold doors and a picture window were added to the extension, which was clad internally with spruce and externally in cedar.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
