My Modern House: architect Thomas Croft’s refurbished 1970s Notting Hill mews house
Thomas Croft’s eponymous architecture practice, which he set up in 1995, specialises in gallery fit-outs for blue-chip names such as Sotheby’s, Skarstedt and Lisson on the one hand and, on the other, deftly executed renovations of historic buildings into modern homes for the likes of Yana Peel, CEO of the Serpentine Gallery, and Sir Paul McCartney.
When it came to creating his own home, a refurbished Notting Hill mews house, Thomas drew from these two areas of expertise to repurpose an existing 1970s structure into a light-filled courtyard home that is comfortable to live in, while also housing Thomas’ collection of modernist furniture, art and books in beautiful fashion.
Here, Thomas tells us of how he went about renovating his house, his obsession for Vitsœ and why a weekend bolthole in Whitstable makes for the perfect contrast to London.
“My journalist wife and
I moved into the house in about 2001 but it had originally been built sometime
in the 1970s. When we arrived, it was pretty grotty having been full of
students living in every corner.
“The original layout
was very cellular with lots of small windows and the result was that the space
was very dark in all seasons and felt quite pokey. We originally did a light
touch renovation but then, in 2013, we demolished almost the whole house and
rebuilt it in a much more open-plan way. The resulting house is 40 per cent
bigger and also makes much more of the courtyard garden, which is now the
house’s focus point.
“Like lots of
architects I love Japanese courtyard houses and the renovation has some of that
spirit; it’s almost as if the garden is a pristine object and we’re forever
walking around the outside, looking into it.
“The oak floorboards used
inside and out are on the same plane, aligned in size and direction, and are made
from identical oak. The intention being that the different environmental
conditions would totally transform the exterior ones while leaving the interior
ones unchanged – a sort of meditation on ageing…
“I designed the glass
chairs outside to be sculptural objects for the garden and they’re conceptually
related to the glazing samples that litter architects’ offices. The idea was
that a pair of these samples had somehow got stuck together which inadvertently
made something you could sit on. I’ve always liked Rietveld’s rather
challenging asymmetric chairs and they’re a bit like those crossed with a Sol
LeWitt sculpture.
“Really the only thing left over from the 1970s house is the spiral staircase. It must’ve been a proprietary item in the original design but is pretty nice and situated in quite an interesting round walled tube with a round rooflight on top. It did the job more efficiently than anything we could have designed so we just left it.
“The kitchen’s location
is quite tricky because it faces into the main living space so there is
absolutely nowhere to hide when it comes to mess. Ideally, we might have had a
kitchen island behind which to hide everything but there just wasn’t the space
for it.
“As an office we do a lot of work with Bulthaup and I’d always wanted one of their kitchens, so it seemed like a natural fit to have one here. They have a beautiful countertop system with concealed cupboards in the splashback and this worked really well for providing somewhere to keep things like washing up liquid that otherwise would clutter the countertop. It’s so smartly designed, every time I use it it feels like cooking in a BMW.
“The story behind the Aalto table and chairs was that a friend of mine bought the fashion designer Bruce Oldfield’s old flat and the table had come with it. When my friend moved abroad, she couldn’t take the table so gave it to me. Then, at considerable expense, I bought the chairs to go with the free table. Then I ended up having them covered in leather by Bill Amberg (whose architect mother coincidentally used to work for Aalto) to create the whole look. So, what started off as a cheap table ended up being quite expensive.
“Jasper Morrison was in
my year at the RCA and I’ve always been very enthusiastic about his work
– we seem to have a lot of it in the house. He’s always designed objects
that are very unobtrusive and easy to live with and that’s the attraction for
me, I think.
“Likewise I’ve been an enthusiast for Dieter
Rams’s products ever since I saw his show at The Boilerhouse Project as a
student and I was a very early customer of Mark Adams and Vitsœ. I still have
plenty of shelves dating back to the early 1990s and vintage Ram’s chairs
bought from Themes & Variations down the road before Mark started the
comparatively recent reissues.
“In my admiration for the product I’ve even gone as far as arranging the wall panelling and the internal and external concrete benches to be set out on the same 90cm dimensional module as the Vitsœ shelves in order to create a harmonious whole – slightly obsessive I know.
“My earliest built work was the renovation of an 18th-century listed barn in Whitstable, Kent as a retirement home for my parents. They’re both long deceased but we’re lucky enough still to have it has a family weekend home. It’s an old shell with a modernist insertion but it’s furnished with all my parents’ brown furniture and old 19th-century pictures, which creates a complete contrast to the house in London, where everything’s modern. As an office, lots of our work deals with this conjunction of old and new so I suppose it’s natural that I’m living it personally!”
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