Stylus Architects Sinks a Larch-Clad Family House into a Back Plot in Roehampton

Most architects never hear the brief that Stylus Architects got for Green Lodge. A long-standing contractor client told them to do whatever they wanted, as long as it was quick. The result is a 175 m² family home, completed in 2025, on a narrow slot of land behind a detached Victorian house in Roehampton Village, at the edge of Putney Heath in southwest London. Its neighbours include a Gothic Revival church, Victorian villas, Arts and Crafts houses and, a little further out, modernist council estates. That is a lot of history for a small new building to stand next to.

So the house mostly doesn't try to stand. Planning constraints pushed much of the accommodation below ground, and what shows above is a modest larch-clad pitched volume behind a timber fence. What interests us is how far the studio carries that restraint. Burying a house usually means giving up daylight. Here, rooflights and sunken lightwells reach every room, and the stair, the concrete and the oak joinery are treated as the main architecture, not as finishes added afterwards. Freedom paired with speed could easily have produced something generic. Instead it produced a house with a clear and careful idea.

A Modest Face to the High Street

From the street, Green Lodge reads almost like an outbuilding: a gabled timber volume, two rooflights and a fence, all under a canopy of mature trees. That understatement is deliberate. On a plot squeezed in behind a Victorian house, a full two-storey frontage would have competed with the villa and with the conservation-minded character of the village. Dropping the floor level lets the roofline sit low and keeps the perceived scale small.

Larch cladding was a sensible choice here. It will weather toward silver and settle in among the tree trunks and old brick. The courtyard views show the cladding wrapping into enclosed garden spaces, with black steel planters and climbing plants softening the boundary. The outdoor rooms feel lived in rather than staged, which matters on a plot this tight.

Rooflights Doing the Heavy Lifting

The angled rooflights are the house's main daylight device. Because they are frameless, they work less like windows and more like cuts in the roof. Over the kitchen they frame the tree canopy. Over the dining table they frame a neighbour's chimney, an oddly charming reminder that you are tucked into an old village and not sealed away from it.

Under overcast London skies, top light is more generous and more even than side light. The living, kitchen and dining spaces get a soft, steady wash that suits the oak and pale stone. The open plan is calm without being sparse. Bouclé seating, brass tables and a long oak dining table give it a domestic warmth that many concrete houses lack.

A Stair as Architecture

Stylus treats the stair as the organising element of the house, and the photographs back that up. A winding oak flight runs between board-marked concrete walls, guarded by a balustrade of tapered vertical timber blades. The double-height void around it collects light from the rooflights and passes it down to the lower floor. In a semi-subterranean house, this is how daylight reaches the bottom of the section.

The material pairing is precise. The concrete keeps its tie-holes and board marks, while the oak is crisp and close-grained. Built-in shelving folds into the circulation, so the landing works as a library as well as a route. It is worth spending money on the stair in a house like this, because you pass through it many times a day.

Oak as a Continuous Lining

The bespoke oak joinery runs through the house as a single lining. It forms the panelled storage wall around the living room, the surround of a linear fireplace set into limewashed walls, and the vertical boards of a corridor that ends in a glazed oak door. That door frames the living room beyond, which is a simple trick that makes a short passage feel deliberate.

Leibal reports that the proportions follow the golden ratio. We would rather judge the outcome than the formula, and the outcome is good: niches, shelves and openings feel sized to the body and to the objects they hold. The dining room's square window looks onto a timber fence and a brick wall, which is a candid view. It admits the boundary is close and makes it part of the composition.

Bathrooms Lit from a Timber Grid

The bathrooms take the most risks. A timber lattice ceiling filters skylight over a grey freestanding tub, and the grid glows like a lantern. Pink walls, fluted stone tile and brass taps push the palette warmer than the rest of the house, which fits rooms meant for lingering.

The concrete washbasin under a sloping ceiling, with its pink tiled splashback, brings the house's structural language down to a small scale without making it feel austere. It is a reminder that the concrete here is a material the house enjoys, not one it simply tolerates.

Bedrooms Built into the Joinery

The bedrooms rely on built-ins: a child's bed on a timber platform with a scalloped rust headboard, a desk with rattan drawers, a window seat set into a deep reveal, and oak wardrobes that take up whole walls. In a house where floor area is limited and partly underground, joinery that does several jobs is how rooms stay generous.

Several of these rooms look out through square windows onto brick or toward lightwells, not out to open views. The design accepts that and leans into enclosure, using the deep window reveals and warm finishes. An arched oak-framed mirror next to a board-formed concrete column shows the same oak-and-concrete pairing found in the stair, now at the scale of getting dressed.

Plans and Drawings

The plans show a tight arrangement around a central stair core. The open living, kitchen and dining level sits on one floor, and three bedrooms with bathrooms sit on the other. Small terraces and stepped garden beds work around the edges. The sections are the most telling drawings: they show the sunken side courtyards that bring light and air to the lower rooms, and they show how the building sits below the line of the neighbouring Victorian house.

The long elevation places the low clad volume next to the older house and its chimney, which makes the deference easy to read. The exploded axonometric lifts the slatted gabled roof and its skylights off the plan, revealing how few elements are doing the work: a roof, its openings, a core, and timber screens.

Why This Project Matters

Infill on leftover back plots is one of the few ways London can add homes in established neighbourhoods without demolition. Green Lodge shows how to do it without the usual compromises. The earth-sheltered form keeps the house's visual presence small and gives it thermal stability. A photovoltaic system and an air-source heat pump keep operational energy very low. Even the services are designed: an artwork by Matthew Withers doubles as a cooling grille, so a functional element becomes part of the interior.

The deeper lesson is about how freedom is used. A builder-client who wanted speed could have accepted a standard box. Stylus put the effort into the elements people actually live with, the stair, the rooflights and the joinery, and kept everything else plain. The result is a buried house that feels bright, a small house that feels thought through, and a new building that is polite to its old neighbours without imitating them.

Green Lodge by Stylus Architects, Roehampton, United Kingdom. Area: 175 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by James Retief.

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