Best in Class: Highgate House by Carmody Groarke
In our new series ‘Best in Class’, we’re scouring the globe for the high-achieving, house envy-inducing, top-of-their-game showstoppers of residential architecture. From contemporary RIBA Award winners to Modernist classics, we’ll be looking at some of the world’s finest homes. To kick things off, we’re casting a spotlight on Highgate House by Carmody Groarke.
Occupying a quiet patch of leafy north London suburbia, the house’s garden backs onto the green expanses of Highgate Woods and neighbours an unassuming swathe of Tudor revival family homes.
It’s these contrasts – bonhomie Edwardian housing stock next to orthogonal modernism; sprawling parkland butting up against precise landscaping – that make the house so pronounced in its setting.
In this way, the Highgate House falls into a tradition of assertive Modernism that counts the Schroder House and Housden House in its legacy. Such buildings stand proud in their relatively conservative milieus, appearing as unwavering manifestations of their own brand of what constitutes modern architecture.
But this implies the Highgate House is a bad neighbour. Not so. The house’s dominant material, red Danish brick, was chosen to provide continuity with the surrounding vernacular. As such, its pronouncement of what constitutes a modern house is not an exclusory one; this is thoughtful, respectful architecture tactfully making its case without being priggish.
Spatially, the house can be divided into three distinct volumes, one of which, the central triple-height hall, forms the space’s nucleus. It’s off this capacious room that the more intimate living areas include cellular bedrooms upstairs and flowing, open spaces downstairs.
It’s an old architectural trick – compression and expansion – but has been deployed at the Highgate House with materials like brown smoked oak and off-white and black Travertine floors to exemplary effect. The resulting atmosphere, especially around the other-worldly lap pool, is one of mystery, intrigue and quiet solemnity.
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