Left: Mr Stummel inside the former furniture workshop. Right: the completed exterior

Published: 17 October, 2013
by DAN CARRIER

GRAND Designs has become a staple of the TV schedules. It features presenter Kevin McCloud nosing around the self-build sites of Britain, finding people creating a quirky property of their dreams.

Camden Town couple Henning Stummel and Alice Dawson’s home and office, built on the site of a former furniture workshop tucked behind garage doors on Royal College Street, has been featured in the show. Their story is one of making use of a unique space to create a family home and office.

The pair’s exploits  now feature in a new DVD celebrating 100 episodes of the award-winning Channel 4 series.

Henning had won an award for a previous project and it was presented to him by Mr McCloud. They kept in touch and when this project began to take shape, he spoke to the show’s producers, and invited the cameras in.

Unlike some Grand Designs episodes, which have self-builders with no training biting off  more than they can chew, Henning is an experienced architect who has made similar designs for others.

He said: “It is very nice to have recorded for posterity.”

Henning and Alice had been renting a home nearby and decided it was time to buy.

They had been hunting for a space and came across the workshop.

It was once used as a way through to the back of the Georgian terrace that runs along the street for horses to access stables. In the 1930s a furniture builder put up a workshop, using an ironwork frame and clad the building with corrugated asbestos sheets.

Henning said: “It had been on the market for four years.

“It was a furniture-making business and had been empty for some time. We fell in love with the original space and wanted to recreate it, but soon found we had to rebuild it completely.

“The workshop had been built in haste and done rather shabbily,” he recalls. “It was full of asbestos. We thought we’d use the same footprint but with better materials.”

The building is in a conservation area and hemmed in by neighbours on all sides.

Henning said: “It was being aimed to be sold to a small business but no one wanted it. It would have been hard to do anything with, surrounded by residential with a drop in levels from the street, so if you built anything in here you’d find it hard to get it out the front entrance.

“And it was wonderful to be designing something for ourselves. London is often about making the best use of the space available, and about working by stealth. It is very much what my practice does anyway.”

Huge windows along the north side meant it was clear where the office and working area should be and then the living areas could be separated by clever use of kitchen cabinets as dividers.

Henning said he wanted to avoid a trap so many people fall into by not respecting the past.

“Many buy an amazing old industrial building and then rip it to pieces and build a normal home in its place,” he says. “We were very clear we didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We wanted to respect the space.”

The original concrete floor was dug up, new pipes put in, and parts of surrounding, original walls had to be underpinned to ensure the work did not affect the neighbours.

“We had tried to recycle the original frame but it was twice the price of putting in a new one,” he said. “But it did mean we could design the frame to be more delicate.”

The build took 18 months, with building clad which included 30 centimetres of insulating rock wool. Inside, panels that create interior walls were built with birch plywood.

“It has got a lovely finish – and it is affordable  and creates a nice serene ambience,” said Henning.

Plastered walls are left unpainted, and it has three bedrooms and two bathrooms hidden by the floor to ceiling birch panels.

And having Mr McCloud on site was not the stressful experience that makes for good TV.

“What you see on TV is what he is like,” said Henning. “It is his passion and vocation.

"You get the sense that the guy is having the time of his life.”

And last week, he and Alice had been out for dinner when they noticed the TV listings had a Grand Designs project based in Camden: they went home, settled down and discovered it was a repeat.

“There we were, watching it all be built again. It was nice to see our home being built but feel chilled out about it,” added Henning.
 

Pictures courtesy of Rachel Whiting/Media 10 Images. Courtesy of Grand Designs magazine
Grand Designs Series 10 out now on DVD