Double-height glass and a mezzanine level brought the dingy ground floor of their much-loved London townhouse back into play for Suyin Du Bois and her husband André
Words JANE CRITTENDEN Photography JIM STEPHENSON
Underwhelmed by the previous properties that they had viewed, Suyin Du Bois and her husband André Lotz had no idea what to expect when they first walked inside the 1970s townhouse that had caught their attention. ‘The architecture was very different compared to the Victorian houses we’d seen, and at first, the ground floor was dark and disappointing,’ Suyin recalls. ‘But when I followed André upstairs to the main living space, he turned around and smiled – and I knew this house was going to be special.’
Light filled the elevated open-plan kitchen-living-dining room, while the second floor had a huge double bedroom and separate bathroom. ‘We were blown away by the big windows and the room proportions,’ says André. ‘Even the original 1970s décor with its shag-pile carpets and pampas green bathroom had a charm about it.’
When the couple moved in, they decided to do very little to the property while they saved for a big renovation project, simply upgrading the bathroom with a shower and decorating their bedroom. It was while living in the house as it was that Suyin and André discovered they rarely used the ground floor, which had an integrated garage, a cupboard-sized shower and loo, and a dark, cold room with sliding doors to the garden. ‘We had a sofa bed and desk in here but it wasn’t very pleasant,’ explains André. ‘We were wasting space, and as this was our only outside access, we weren’t using the garden much either.’
To gain design inspiration, they looked at plans for neighbouring properties on the online planning portal. Since the ground floor stepped back from the first floor by just over a metre, their next-door neighbours had extended to bring the floors in line with one another. The couple considered doing the same to relocate the kitchen-diner, but were torn. ‘We didn’t want to lose the wow factor of the bright, open-plan first floor, nor create a disconnect by keeping the living room here and not use it,’ André explains. ‘The alternative was to keep everything the same and build a
