Polysmiths Wraps a Backland Infill House in East London with Cork Walls, Inside and Out

Cork House is a 150 m² three-bedroom home tucked into a brownfield plot in Forest Gate, in the London borough of Newham. It was designed by Polysmiths, whose director Charles Wu acted as architect, client and developer at once. Wu bought the site in 2020. Construction then ran straight into the Covid-19 supply crunch, when concrete, plasterboard and plywood became scarce or too expensive to justify. The original plan used conventional blockwork and timber frame. What got built instead was a house finished in cork, lime plaster and locally sourced timber.

The interesting part is not that the house is sustainable; plenty of houses claim that. What matters is how the material shortage became a design brief. Cork is usually hidden as cavity insulation. Here it is the visible surface, both on the facade and on the interior walls. The project doubles as a test of two ideas that London needs to take more seriously: building on the leftover infill plots behind terraced streets, and treating construction as research rather than routine.

Arriving Through the Back of the Block

You reach the house down a gravel path between charred timber fences, through a door cut into an old pink brick wall. The approach tells you this is a backland site, the kind of plot that sits behind rows of houses and usually stays a garage court or a weedy yard. Polysmiths keeps the sense of discovery intact rather than forcing a street frontage onto it.

Outside, three materials meet at the corners: corrugated metal, the dark granular texture of cork, and the pale brick of the existing garden walls. It is a frank collage. The cork reads less like a cladding product and more like a soft, weathering mass, which suits a house that sits among trees and boundary walls instead of facing a road.

Cork Moves from the Cavity to the Surface

The ground floor is an open-plan living and dining space under exposed timber joists, with folding black-framed glass doors opening onto a brick courtyard planted with tall grasses. The cork walls are the main event. Their warm brown surface absorbs light and, we would expect, sound, so the room feels quieter and denser than a typical white-walled extension.

The cork came from the Portuguese producer Amorim, supplied through the Welsh merchant Mike Wye. Cork is harvested from the bark of the cork oak without felling the tree, and it insulates well. Using one material for insulation and finish cuts out layers that would normally include plasterboard and paint. That is the real efficiency here: fewer products, fewer trades, fewer things to fail.

A Dining Room Organised Around the Courtyard

The dining table sits at the hinge of the plan, against a cork wall and facing the courtyard. Window openings are lined in cork too, so the deep reveals frame the outdoor table and brickwork like small pictures. When the glazed doors fold back, inside and outside merge into a single domestic space.

Not every wall is cork. Lime-plastered partitions break up the run of material and let the timber ceiling and furniture take a turn as the focus. A skylit alcove with a linen-covered table brings daylight deep into the plan, which matters on a plot hemmed in by neighbours on every side.

Kitchen, Rooflights and Planted Voids

The kitchen pairs green cabinetry and brass-fronted units with a concrete island sink. A rooflight over a planted void throws diagonal bars of sunlight across the walls. For a backland house with limited outlook, this is the right move: light comes from above rather than from windows that would look straight at a neighbour's fence.

The palette is restrained, but it is not minimal for its own sake. Brass, green lacquer and cork all age visibly. You can read the house as a bet that patina is preferable to the factory-fresh blankness of plasterboard.

Stair, Bedroom and Study

The stair is lined in darker cork, with carpeted treads and a small window that sends a sharp shaft of sunlight across the textured surface. Upstairs, the bedroom sits between an ensuite bath and the cork-lined stair passage, with a rattan headboard and heavy charcoal curtains. The darker tone gives the private rooms a cocooned, almost nocturnal character that contrasts with the bright ground floor.

A small study, fully wrapped in cork under exposed joists, shows the material at its most practical. It is a pinboard, an acoustic absorber and an insulator in one surface. For a room built for focus, that combination is hard to beat.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan makes the infill logic clear: a small freestanding house in the middle of a block, surrounded by long terraced gardens and trees, connected to the street by a narrow path. The ground floor stretches along the rectangular plot, while the upper floor holds a single bedroom and bathroom in a smaller volume. A roof area lies below it to the south.

The roof plan and section show a stepped massing: a two-storey volume next to a lower single-storey wing with planted roofs, a central rooflight and a run of glazed doors. Keeping most of the house low respects the neighbours' gardens and sunlight, which is usually the deciding factor for planning approval on backland sites.

Why This Project Matters

Cork House shows what happens when supply-chain failure forces an architect to question the default specification. Concrete, plasterboard and plywood are so normal in British housebuilding that they rarely get challenged. Polysmiths swapped them for cork, lime and local timber, and ended up with a house that has more character and fewer layers. The lesson is not "use cork everywhere". It is that the standard material list is a habit, not a law.

The project also matters as a model for small-site housing. London has thousands of awkward backland plots, and most stay empty because they look too complicated to develop. With the architect as client and developer, Wu could take risks on both the site and the materials that a conventional developer would avoid. We would like to see more practices treat their own projects as research, then publish what works so others can build on it.

Cork House by Polysmiths, Forest Gate, Newham, London, United Kingdom. Area: 150 m². Completed: 2022. Photography: French + Tye, Lorenzo Zandri.

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