House of the Year 2024 shortlist: Six Columns

Six Columns is an inventive and bespoke home for one of the founders of 31/44 Architects, designed to meet their family’s changing needs over many years. Sited in a previously undeveloped side-garden, it completes a row of semi-detached houses in a leafy south London suburb. The home draws on an eclectic array of personal and architectural references while achieving a sophisticated use of space and materials. 

As the name suggests, there are six columns on the front and rear elevations. A single-storey volume to the left breaks up the two-storey pitched volume to the right, and the entrance is at the junction between the two. The facade adopts the brick-and-terracotta-tile materiality of the nearby houses, but there is also inspiration from further afield – a column in front of a white-veined, dark green marble wall evokes Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. 

Inside, the hallway unfurls into a generous open kitchen, dining and sitting space which is flanked by two gardens. Exposed timber beams and simple robust timber panels are used throughout the ground floor. In the living room, a clerestory is created via glazing between the chunky plywood beam ends to admit light while maintaining privacy from the street. A single air-source heat pump provides all the house requires for heating and washing, with bills a fraction of typical running costs.

The overall design hinged on navigating existing trees, notably a large, protected sycamore to the rear of the site. The resulting fragmented footprint has created harmonious external spaces and is a feast for the eyes at every turn.

The judges commended 31/44 Architects’ ability to ‘turn challenging constraints into opportunities with admirable technical confidence’ and its adept approach throughout: ‘The building displays the architect’s mastery, weaving materials and references into a holistically orchestrated family home. The expression is simple and yet refined, without a hint of being forced.’

What is your favourite feature of the house?

Will Burges After building houses for clients, it’s odd living in something so bespoke and tailored to how we live. However, we’ve already begun to make adjustments – the idea for the house was that it would be ‘unfinished’ in some ways, enabling easy change and fine-tuning. I didn’t like the idea that it would be seen as the perfect expression of my, or the practice’s values, that felt too fixed. We continue to learn from the things we make, and of course how we live evolves. The house had to be able to move with us. We’re enjoying thinking about the next small tweak… there’s a list!

What was the greatest challenge?

It’s difficult to pick a single moment – one seemingly huge challenge just kept getting replaced by the next. Finding the land was a huge hurdle, then it became about achieving planning consent and ultimately about persuading a bank to lend us the money.

What lessons from the project could be applied elsewhere?

As a studio, we want to continue practising the architectural language we believe in while finding new and different ways to deliver it. Six Columns has become a useful exemplar when discussing future projects with clients, as it demonstrates the visual outcome of design techniques we would like to use to build more thoughtfully.

For example, externally we used cement panelling on a timber frame, only employing in-situ concrete where necessary, to create a visual weight to the architectural elements while minimising materials with high-embodied carbon.

Also, we can now point to differences between the finishes on the ground floor, which features a masonry inner leaf and self-finished materials, and the first floor, which has more conventional plaster finishes on a heavily insulated timber frame. 

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