Before being “recast,” the house was like any other. “It’s quite a humdrum Victorian street—there are hundreds like them in London,” architect Ben Allen says. The house’s residents, a retired couple, gave Studio Ben Allen free rein to experiment and renovate the house. Ben chose colored concrete as his weapon and proved it a beautiful, though uncommon medium to incorporate vibrance and create a feeling of solidity in a home.
The studio started with concrete as the structural and aesthetic foundation of the house. “There’s an inherent enjoyment to being inside of a building that has weight to it,” Ben says. “It feels solid, and it gives you a very strong sense of being protected.”
Clearly the design went in a very un-Victorian direction, so the studio tied it back together through exoticism. “The most interesting Victorian architecture has that eastern influence to it,” Ben says. The studio produced the concrete panels off-site and dyed them muted green and salmon colors, inspired by high Victorian exotic architecture. The dusty green recalls copper, and the reddish salmon reminds of terra-cotta brick, both preferred materials in Victorian architecture.
The concrete screen visible through the bathroom window and ornamentation on the staircase railing have a distinctly Middle Eastern feel. The bathroom, a focal point of the home, is inspired by Turkish baths. As a whole the house aims to balance concrete’s weight and solemnity with the joy of color and unexpected details.
Ben was hesitant about color at first. “The worry about colors is that they always date very quickly, which is why we try to find strong historic references,” he says.
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- “The end point of this journey was the bathroom,” Ben says. With vaulted ceilings and doused in green, the bathroom is complete with a mix of bespoke faucets and customized Dornbracht Tara.
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- Ben’s favorite detail is the shower, which pours water from a big brass pipe. “For all the flourishes it’s about the crudest thing you can do,” he says. “Sometimes playful can be quite blunt.”
A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 09 with the headline “House Recast.” Subscribe today.
