Elgin Avenue
Maida Vale, London W9
£4,760 pcm / £1,100 pw

Introduction
Accommodation
History
Download floorplan (pdf)

The house has been built on the site of what was a single-storey wine vault, squeezed in between two Victorian buildings, and set back slightly from the street. The front elevation is just 3m wide, and calls to mind the equally narrow Clerkenwell House on Golden Lane, designed by Jo Hagan of USE Architects.

Sliver House (also known as the Glass House) was the subject of an article by Tony McIntyre in Building Design in April 2007:

"I’m certain it wasn’t in the architects’ conscious minds while struggling with this narrow and awkward site, but the main impact of the simple house they have produced in Elgin Avenue is an emotional one: the kind of emotion that comes from moving through small dark space, emerging into wide light spaces, taking devious routes, delving into cave spaces. The last thing one might expect from a very little house in west London is an essay in the essence of picturesque architecture, but here it seems to be…

"The first surprise comes when you go in to find the ground floor opening up away from you in a big wedge of a room, widening to 6m. This is the general living room/entrance hall, which ends in a folding-glass wall, with a generous 3m-wide roof terrace beyond. The room feels bigger than the small introduction would suggest, and bigger still because the terrace ends not with a panorama, but with a brick wall…

"Going into the basement, one edges down a narrow confining staircase — this is minimal in the regulatory sense — and is confronted at the bottom with a kind of spatial inversion: you arrive not at the beginning of the room, but at its centre. The room is the same shape and size as the one above, but instead of two walls of window, there are no windows at all. Yet there is light. It comes from above, from two broad slabs of glass buried in the roof terrace above. This alternation — small space-big space-inverted space — goes on throughout the house. And you are aware of its front and centre position because the stuff of the house is so essentially modest. Our attention isn’t being called to anything more lavish than a rather nicely detailed façade, a fragment of curtain walling with obscured glass that masks the ground and bedroom floors above…

"Upstairs things are just as pragmatic. The staircase launches itself across the house, dividing the first floor into two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. But the shower is unexpectedly large, and the route to it is a bit twisty. On plan, the top floor looks as if there might be some constructivist dynamic stuff going on — staircase slashing across the room — but you get there and you just don’t notice it. You notice that the stair is one of those in-the-thickness-of-the-castle-wall affairs, and when you emerge from it, that bedroom seems pretty big. Even more, a generous bathroom is attached, with a neatly shoehorned shower…

"So what we have here is another fraction of the indeterminable story of fragmentation; a site that is a spatial splinter, a chasm between the certainties of middle-class Victorian London. The constraints are hard, technical and spatial, there isn’t a lot of room to play around — get that space in! And almost (almost) incidentally, the house’s steady dedication to getting the job done throws off a rather delightful wake in the form of highly contrasting spatial values, expressed in light and volume alone."