This home for an actress and musician carefully slots between buildings and site-lines, and wraps built-in furniture into every available surface. Both plan and Planning constraints generated a complex series of intertwining spaces, enlivened by light and interconnectivity. The massing was generated from the view-lines along the High Street below, tucked carefully out of sight to achieve planning permission for a new storey with front outdoor space hidden within the row of listed buildings. A crystalline valley skylight hangs above, flooding the void with light.

Staggered floor sections carefully borrow space from below. The V-shape in section repeats in plan to ease a tidy outdoor terrace between new and old façades, the doors from hall and bedroom folding neatly together.

Spaces from adjacent rooms are borrowed and traded, with each room offering a panoply of different views and directions. Mirrors double and quadruple the extent of views and entice optical exploration, while maximum continuity between the surfaces of the built-in furniture provides a sense of further elongation, and interest.

The house assembles around the central open stair, its timber strands growing upwards towards the light and unleashing delicate tendrils to frame each step, a single thin metallic line dancing across their lines to offer the lightest of additional support to the hands that seek it.

Upstairs a desk and shelving unit in the study, wrapping around to welcome the unfolding sheaves of floorplank that conceal a bed within the floor-depth. The low table/cupboard nestled at the window flows out to form a long courtyard storage bench, which slips back inside as a bathroom counter, carved with a sunken bath.

The house is thus unified by a single curl of complex in-built furniture, bridging inside and out. The rear window angles carefully back above its sloping brick parapet, offering great starry views from the pillow. Its fixed glazing folds at the stairwell to form an opening frame, a complex rhomboid perfectly slotted into the available space. The courtyard opposite protects privacy yet offers generous views of sky and city (from bath or bench, table or toilet), and tantalising views into the intricacy of this urban jewel. Location: United Kingdom

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