'Richard Nightingale was amused and perhaps
slightly embarrassed by the idea of his
home being dignified with the title "The
Nightingale House" - it was initially rejected
by the planners who condemned the design
as "inter-war suburbia style". The house
was never meant to articulate some grand,
public statement; its designers see the
relationship between built space and inhabitation
as both individual - we despise a variety
of "settings" by drawing on recollections
of experienced examples - and collective,
"all the settings in out repertoire being
firmly embedded in our culture in their
ultimate, mythical form". 1
'Ideas for the house began to emerge
in 1983 when Richard Nightingale bought
the site in Belsize Park. He was working
for Colin St. John Wilson on the British
Library. Hugh Cullum was teaching at Cambridge
and writing his PhD thesis "La Venaria
Reale; a study in rhetorical space". Cullum
and Nightingale did much of the building
themselves, making changes as they went
along - even now, the design is still evolving,
sometimes to accommodate new ideas, sometimes
for purely practical reasons.
'The site is tiny - 4.5m wide, next
to a four-storey Victorian semi.
The house extends slightly beyond the permitted
limits,
set back from the street at the front,
with a small garden complete with
pear tree at the back. Its height was not
to
exceed that of the porch next door,
so the structure is sunk into the ground,
which is cut away in front, to allow
enough
room for two floors.
Spatial Concerns
'The primary concern was simply to
fit the appropriate spaces in to
a small volume so that they would work
together
as a whole and not just be a collection
of individual parts. It was crucial
to create a feeling a space - to make something
much more open than a typical English
town
house of comparable size. A lot of
the early design work was done using models
to explore relationships between
the internal
volumes. The resulting building feels
a bit like a scaled-up model, perhaps a
little
ponderous and "blocky" - a building
where the space rather than the structure
has
been carefully articulated.
'From the street, a column set to
one side of a window at an angle
points the way down dark-tiled steps, where
the
buildinghas been cut back to leave
access to the next-door basement flat.
Proustian
ideals of inhabiting space, settings
which are "reshaped in (their) ... inhabitation
by the individual imagination" 2 are
obvious
concerns even here. What looks like
an opening in the white-rendered wall at
the
end of the passage turns out to be
a panel of glass blocks; the front door
itself
is to the left. Once inside, full-height
mirrors on either side of the hall
reflect the tiny space (and its occupant)
to infinity.
Doormat-sized, it serves as a kind
of initiation space, with echoes of the
labyrinth. The
main living area is further round
to the right, hinted at through the glass
blocks
at the entrance.
'The main living space is a double-height
central volume, topped by a skylight,
which makes manifest its "aspirations
to perfection"
in its four-way symmetry, and in
a way in which it reaches from the sunken
ground
floor up to the sky. Darker colours
at the bottom - a floor of graphite cement
screed and green Cumberland slate
- change
to pure brilliant white, metal and
glass at the top. Planes of colour move
away
from the centre, "clarifying and
dramatizing the spatial relations", 3 leaving
the double-height
volume immaculate and undisturbed.
The dark brownish red fireplace seems almost
chthonic, like the polychrome altar
of
a Baroque church. The stairs wind
up behind the glittering chrome flue, so
as not to
disrupt the central symmetry.
'Other rooms work away from the central,
introspective space, mediating between
it and the outside world of the garden
or city. A dining table sits comfotably
under the balcony to one side; beyond
it is the kitchen with the angled window
of
the entrance passage. The cupboards,
shelves and window seat are faced in a
rich oak
veneer, warm and homely. Red flecks
in the predominantly dark green terrazzo
top
are picked up by the deep red of
the opposite wall.
'Directly above the kitchen is the
guest bedroom, with a wooden seat
in the angle of the window. Next to it,
the bathroom
is a curved object sitting neatly
on the balcony surrounding the central
space above
the basin and lavatory, so that the
curve of the wall is reflected and becomes
a
circle. It is lit from a rooflight
sunk deep into the ceiling, so that the
person
at the basin is bathed in light,
standing at the apparent centre. The bath
itself
seems to be in its own little room
of mahogany panelling - a comfortable gentleman's
club.
Shower head, taps and control knob
are displayed like pictures on the flat
surface
of the veneer.
'At the top of the stairs, a tiny
square window looks out over the
entrance passage to the street beyond.
The space
in front of the window has a slightly
lower ceiling, creating just enough sense
of
enclosure for it to become a small
"study", where you can be St Jerome or
Victor Hugo.
The balcony rail looking out over
the central space is a wide, flat piece
of oak-veneered
wood, which is separated from its
solid oak trim by a fine strip of aluminium
-
it is ideal for leaning over or sitting
on. Metal mesh panels set towards
the front of the rail leave space for Chareau-like
bookshelves behind, reached from
the balcony.
'The balcony continues round the
perimeter of the central space to
the niche of the "master bedroom", the
culmination
of a joinery through the building.
Commanding yet hidden, it surveys the entire
domain:
a small window gives out on to the
garden at the rear, and an internal window
looks
back over the stairs across the study
and then out to the street, giving an axis
right through the house.
'The perfect centrality of the house
is disturbed by a double-height window,
which is pulled away from the rear
façade
in an irregular curve to create a
mediating space between interior and garden.
Both
this window and those at the front
use materials which draw attention to the
opposition
of internal and external space. The
walls, matt elsewhere, are gloss-painted,
as is
the wooden panel of the ceiling.
The window seats are thick pieces of oak-veneered
MDF with a clear gloss varnish. Every
surface
is smooth and hard, like the faience
interior of a loggia. The window mullions,
slender
yet deep, reflect light far into
the building.
'If asked, both architects will insist
that most of the considerations involved
in building the house were purely
pragmatic. Richard Nightingale claims that
the flue
was positioned 1m away from the party
wall simply so that it did not have
to be built to the height of the adjoining
building. Hugh Cullum says that the
dropped
ceiling which creates the study area
is the result of a rain-water pipe from
the
roof which appeared lower than expected.
But it reads very strongly as a complete
composition, a villa in miniature,
its grand sense of scale is borrowed from
the
apparent double height of the front
windows, and its rusticated base is deep
purple
on the lower half of the façade.
The tiny garden boasts a path whose
gentle narrowing perpetuates the
grand illusion.
The introspective central space of
the house is ordered and four-square;
here is the complete seclusion of the
vita contemplativa, but here also
is room for the pursuit of more hedonistic
pleasures, for
dinner parties and the like - this
city villa,
set like a jewel in suburbia, is
more than just a meditative retreat.'
1,2 Hugh Cullum
and Richard Nightingale, UIA International Architect, December 1985.
3 Le Corbusier, Polychromic Architecturale, 1931. |
