There is an architect’s red signboard up: Michaelis Boyd, it says. Alex Michaelis is standing next to me. This is going to be his home. It will be big, and it will be clever. But it is going to be pretty much invisible.
“Do you want to walk around a bit in the mud?” Michaelis inquires. Er, no, I don’t, as it happens. Here on the pavement is just fine, well away from the huge drilling rig, which is inclined to spurt fountains of mud. The rig is plunging a borehole hundreds of feet beneath the capital. Fortunately, says Michaelis, they haven’t encountered any old plague pits. They really upset things, contamination- wise. And when you’re paying £10,000 to drill your own well, and have designed a £750,000 house around it, no such news is very good news.
Michaelis is in the fortunate position of being able to design and build his own house. With his partner Tim Boyd, he designs fashionable bars, restaurants — including trendy Moro — and some other interesting stuff such as updating the famous nearby Electric Cinema. When über-architect Richard Rogers — for whom he used to work — wants alterations done to his own huge Chelsea pad, it’s Michaelis Boyd he tends to call in. So Michaelis was in a position to raise the cash to buy the site to build a house for himself, his wife Caroline and their three young children. Even so, it was only made financially possible by one little planning restriction on the site — nothing was allowed to be built higher than the brick wall running along the front. At 6ft, it is not a particularly high wall.
This restriction put off developers and made the land a bit more affordable. Only by London standards, though — it cost as much to buy as the house will to build. That gives the project a price tag of £1.5m, “although if you built a normal four-storey house there, the land alone would be at least £2m,” he points out.
But Michaelis is not building a normal house. He is building a two-storey house that is sunk into the ground, with a grass roof. He will have not only his borehole — both as drinking water and as a constant-temperature energy source — but will use a solar-powered water heater, a heat pump and electricity-generating photovoltaic panels to reduce the running costs of the house to about a fifth of the average.
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Despite being pushed down into the ground, this is to be a five-bedroom family house. Those bedrooms, plus a pool clad in green glass mosaic and three bathrooms, will all be on the lower level. The upper level is smaller, to allow an open terrace out the back. Virtually the entire floor is given over to one huge living/dining/kitchen area, plus a little study and cloakroom. A central stair (with integral slide — what a great idea) joins the two levels beneath one of two large roof lanterns — the other being over the entrance lobby.
Apart from the terrace there’s no garden, but all the space around the edge of the site will be planted, too. This is like a huge basement flat with no house above it, so it can have roof lights as well as big windows to the terrace. It will be naturally a lot brighter than many Victorian houses.
Michaelis gestures at the mudpatch. “All the piling is in round the edges,” he says. “Soon we’re going to start to dig. The concrete shell will be up by October, and it should all be finished by next spring.”
Only somebody with long experience of houses would talk with such confidence, faced with this morass. As for the idea of the sunken house, Michaelis knows there are others on the way. It’s a way of building where nobody thought to build before.
Because it’s so expensive to do, the formula really only works in places where land commands a high value. Well, that’ll be Notting Hill, then.
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Michaelis Boyd Architects, 020 7221 1237, www.michaelisboyd.com