See that yellow bucket,” says Jemima Garthwaite, pointing to a photograph on her screen. “Every time I had a shower or washed my hands in the bathroom, I’d have to come downstairs, carry it outside and pour it down a drain in the garden.” We are flicking through a folder of images called “During”, as Garthwaite recalls the gruelling process of renovating and extending her home in east London. The bucket sat under a waste pipe in the middle of what is now her kitchen. “It went on for weeks. That was the least fun element of living here.”
“And this – believe it or not – is when the builders left.” She shows me a sorry image of the kitchen extension: unplastered, unfurnished, unfinished. “I’d run out of money. I had to do the rest myself.” Garthwaite trained as an architect (“the most over-glamourised industry ever”), so she had a clear sense of what needed doing. Even so, it took her four years to finish what the builders had started. “I worked evenings and weekends. I’d even come home during my lunch break to chisel for half an hour.”
When Garthwaite bought the house seven years ago it was a small two-up, two-down Victorian terrace with a dog-leg kitchen. The previous owners had kept many of the original features and managed to legally double the size of the garden by “squatting” an unused patch of land behind the property for years. With such generous outside space, it made sense for Garthwaite to add a full-width extension to the ground floor.
At the time, her friend Tom Kaneko was living with her. He specialises in small-scale residential projects. Together, they started to think about what that extension might look like. Garthwaite – who is the founder and director of the creative agency This Here – would spend her lunch breaks with a roll of tracing paper, perfecting the floorplan, which she would take home and share with Kaneko.
Natural light became a major preoccupation. With every full-width extension, there is a risk that the centre of the house – the room that connects the old with the new – becomes dark and uninhabitable. To overcome this, Kaneko introduced the idea of an interior garden that would pool light on three sides. But this proved too expensive. “It was cheaper to have one roof light than three walls, so the space is now used as a bright office.” A further two roof lights, bi-fold doors and a picture window were added to the extension, which was clad internally with spruce and externally in cedar.
Sightlines were another guiding principle. Kaneko wanted the garden to be visible from the front door, so there is a generous passageway that connects the original building with the new extension. Even the bespoke birch-ply kitchen was designed in such a way that it doesn’t obstruct the picture window. The result is a seamless flow between the two spaces.
Though connected, there is a distinction between the original Victorian rooms and the new addition. Garthwaite has furnished the living room with eBay finds and items handed down from her family. The furniture and floors are warm and wooden, the sofa and chairs have been re-upholstered in linen and leather, the open fire is flanked by fitted cupboards lined with layers of exposed original wallpaper and Penguin classics. By comparison, the kitchen extension has a concrete floor. A deep window seat is upholstered in a loud palm print and a set of copper chairs glints around the dining table. House plants creep up the exposed timber rafters towards the pitched roof. It’s a relaxed, summery foil to the formality at the front of the house.
Throughout, there’s evidence of Garthwaite’s hard graft. She has sanded and repaired the original floorboards, exposed brick walls and repaired the pointing with porous lime mortar. The unpolished concrete floor in the kitchen was poured by hand. (“When a crack appears, I’ll sit down with a bag of cement and a chisel and a hammer, and I’ll fix it.”) The result is not only a happy, handbuilt home: the whole experience has become the genesis of a new business idea.
“Building this house has made me realise the issues with the British wood industry,” explains Garthwaite. “I was broke when I did this, so my kitchen was clad in cheap, imported Sitka spruce and cedar, because finding a British alternative was almost impossible.” Like the crack in her concrete floor, Garthwaite is fixing this gap by creating One Thing Well, an online marketplace for British timber that connects woodland owners with sawmills, who can then sell their stock directly to contractors and architects.
Her research has led her to the discovery of a thermal-treated British wood ideal for external cladding. “I keep thinking I’d like to have some here,” she muses. “It would only take a day to reclad the extension. It’s not complicated…”
