Cheek by jowl with a modest row of terraced Victorian cottages, Cargo Fleet comes as a surprise. This striking new timber-framed corner house, built by architects Stephen Chance and Wendy de Silva as their own home, is clad in a coat of rusting Cor-Ten steel plates and larch. Its elongated, contemporary design has polarised opinion in this small Highbury backwater.
“It has had a varied reaction,” says Chance. “Some don’t like the fact that it is different to other houses on the street, and they probably don’t like modern architecture at all. Some think it’s great. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground with this.”
The couple noticed the disused patch of ground, owned by Islington borough council, at the end of the terraced street about 10 minutes’ walk from their former home. When the council put the plot up for auction in 2000, Chance and de Silva snapped it up with a bid of £144,000.
“We weren’t actually sure we were going to live in the house ourselves in the beginning,” Chance says. “So we came up with a flexible, elongated design that could be occupied as one house or two, and got planning permission for two dwellings. When we were doing the paperwork to fund the project, to the bank it seemed more valuable as two houses than one, and that all helped in bidding for the site.”
As the practice Chance de Silva, the couple designed their building in two sections at either end of the plot, with a small garden between them, linked by an enclosed and partly glazed walkway running down the back of the green courtyard. Each section has its own kitchen/living area, bathroom and front door so the two could be separated off with a dividing wall and sold independently.
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“We now use it as a live/work house with the smaller section holding our offices on two floors,” says Chance. “But it could be used in lots of different ways. You could put your granny in one of them, or keep one bit and sell the other.”
The design of the house also takes into account the fact that the site edges straight on to the street on much of its building line, with not even a pavement to soften the border.
“You can’t easily put low-level windows straight on to the street because of security and not wanting people peering in with their noses to the glass,” says Chance. “So we decided all the main living accommodation should be on the top floor and created a fairly blank ground level. Then as you go upstairs it all opens out, with balconies and lots of glass and views out to the gardens and neighbourhood.”
Many rooms are designed to be multifunctional, such as the open-plan kitchen/living rooms and spaces that can serve as bedrooms or offices. Finishes are raw and semi-industrial, with concrete floors downstairs and oak upstairs. The Cor-Ten coating on Cargo Fleet — the first house in the UK to be treated with these Finnish- made steel plates — reminds Chance of his own northern roots, growing up around the steel towns of the northeast. The Cor-Ten is intended to form a protective layer of rust as it weathers, while the contrasting larch alongside will also weather to grey.
With a build cost of £325,000, Cargo Fleet shows an original and fresh approach to an unusual and potentially limiting site. “There is an argument that says all modern architects should be forced to live in their own houses, rather than designing contemporary homes for their clients and living in Georgian buildings themselves,” says Chance.
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“And that’s fine by us, even though we didn’t have a set idea about staying on. It is great and really enjoyable to live in something that you have designed yourself. You discover new things that then feed into your work. You get to understand so much about it.”
Chance de Silva, 020 7690 4406, www.chancedesilva.com