Dalston Abbey

This is my first attempt at pleaching trees. I planted the lime (linden) trees (bare root) in the winter, built a trellis frame, lobbed off the tops and started training the branches horizontally. There are lots of buds on the branches and so it should look a little more impressive in spring. I'll post more photographs then. 

It may have a Georgian facade, but the back of the house is thoroughly modern. Architecture by Martyn Clarke and furniture by material-life.co.uk. 

4 October. About three weeks to go before we move in. We're almost there. The kitchen just needs some glass fitted behind the hob and then it's complete. The last coat of paint needs to go on and the last lights popped into place. The paving in the back garden is being finished off and we'll have to order some plants now as it's looking a little bare. 

3 Sept: The scaffolding has come off the front of the house and almost all the the internal plastering has been completed. The kitchen is being installed, as are storage units in the sitting room. Now the painting starts in earnest. 

Progress report - 1 August. Parts of the inside have been plastered, underfloor heating is in, electricity in place, garden hard landscaping completed, front and back plastering nearing completion. Still waiting for the delayed double glazed windows.

Our architect, Martyn Clarke, had been tearing his hair out trying to find an elegant, modern solution for the staircase. What he came up with we think is brilliant! The main order of priority was to have a more open staircase and we had widened it by moving back adjacent walls. The upper ground floor door openings were raised in order to create a vista through the house from the front door. Martyn’s solution was to design oak fins, which create architectural interest but are also fundamental to making the staircase work. Each section of the stair is hung from the floor above and the slats work in tension so (theoretically) they shouldn’t flap around. Additional steel rods in the slats will stop them from moving. The stair looks like it could be one of the house’s most spectacular design features!

Week 9: The house now has a water-tight roof on the extension. The side extension is bricked up completely and the back of the house is starting to get its modernist look. The inside is being transformed too and it's now possible to see the shapes and sizes of all the rooms. 

Week 6: The floors have been poured, the steel work for the extension has been completed and the builders are now starting work on the roof of the extension and bricking up the side extension. 

One month into the build. The the floors are being poured in the back and side extension and in the lower ground floor, which has now being dug deeper. Metal boxes hold up the back and middle of the house. Stud walls are going in upstairs and the master bedroom and ensuite are being re-shaped. 

Day 14: Two weeks into the project and the back wall on the lower ground floor has been removed completely. The back of the house is now being propped up with temporary metal supports. But from inside, we get the first glimpse of what the view of the garden will be like from the living room. 

Day 7: The back of the house has been demolished and the trench dug for the new foundations. The back of the house is now decorated with bathroom tiles. 

The existing and proposed plans for Dalston Abbey. Over the next months we should see the house transform from the plans on the left to the ones on the right. 

Day Three of the build and Dalston Abbey is already looking quite different. Some heavy machinery has moved in; the conservatory has been pulled down; and there's no roof on the upstairs bathroom. All the carpets have been yanked out and so has the shelving in what used to be the living room. 

Just in case you were wondering where Dalston Abbey is located. Here's a London tube map with the "ginger line" shown circling central London. Our closest tube station is Dalston Junction, which is at 2pm on the "ginger line". 

Here are some interior photographs of the house pre-renovation. Like many Georgian houses in London, when this house was originally built, it didn't have a bathroom. Around the corner from our house is de Beauvoir's "bath house", which only closed in the 1970s and is now a Vietnamese restaurant! The bathrooms that were added to the back of the house at some point are now being demolished. New ones are being built on the side of the house. The best view of the garden is currently from the loo window, but that's set to change . . . 

This is the exterior of our house, which was built in 1837, the photographs taken the weekend before our renovation commenced. It was the first sunny spring day of 2013. Most of the houses on the street look the same. Ours is an end-of-terrace and so our plan is to extend to the side of the house and "turn it around" so that it looks at the garden - a rare luxury in central London and the reason for us leaving central Marylebone to live in Dalston, the centre of London's trendy creative and tech scene. 

This is an illustration by Dalston artist Jane Smith of de Beauvoir Square, which is just around the corner from our house. When this part of London was laid out in the early 1800s, this was going to be one of several similar looking squares in de Beauvoir Town. As it happened, only this one was built. One side of the square was bombed during the Second World War, but much of the rest of de Beauvoir survived and today it's the first preserved Georgian residential area north of the City of London.