Turner Architects + Interiors

Stepping out of the bustle of the city. Stepping through the house. Into a quiet space. A special space.

Whilst the noise and the weather of London knock at the door, here is a place that gathers and protects. A room for coming together, for resting, for finding pause. A space about shelter above all else.

The materials are from the ground: brick, fired earth, clay underfoot. Lifted and laid, they form walls and roof, framed with simple timber. Honest, weighty, and direct. A single window to sit against. A single door to walk through.

The outlook is a small garden — confined, urban — yet within it, the imagination stretches outwards. It is the expanse of walking through the Scottish highlands, the relief of finding a warm fire, the familiarity of a much-loved bothy.

In Peckham, this is our bothy: a quiet refuge at the heart of the city, made with the simplest of means, offering the deepest of comforts.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

The spaces in between. The overlooked, the narrow, the incidental. Here, they are not dismissed as void but celebrated as places of delight. Negative space becomes positive, a rhythm that carries through the house.

The brief was to reinvent the Victorian terrace. A tough challenge when the pattern is so imposing, its repetition so deeply set, its edges confining. What can be done is not to erase it, but to adapt it; to let the house breathe for a new way of living.

The kitchen is no longer hidden. It is open, communal, a place where life gathers around the making of food. The garden is no longer relentlessly functional. It is a place to sit, to look out, to enjoy. The sitting room is transformed too; not a bustling hub but a quiet retreat, a room for reflection, a formal, grown-up pause within the flow of family life. The bathroom, simple and filled with light, restores calm to the everyday.

And yet, beyond these rooms, the true story of the house is told in the margins. The in-between spaces; the corridors, the corners, the moments of passing; are given purpose. Art finds its way here, slipping into walls and thresholds, filling gaps with colour and texture. A turn of the head reveals another story: a gesture, a hand, a crafted piece of life.

So even the most ordinary of rituals; washing up, tying shoes, climbing the stairs; are lifted. They are accompanied by something more: a touch of joy, a fragment of narrative, a spark of inspiration. The house acknowledges that living is not only found in the headline spaces, but in the interludes between them.

This is a house that understands the spaces in between. A house where art and life are woven together, where the overlooked becomes the memorable, and where every corner can delight.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

Above the everyday, beyond the familiar lines of the house, sits a quiet room of light and timber; a space once overlooked now reinhabited. In this roof conversion, the ordinary becomes extraordinary; what was attic becomes refuge.

Clad entirely in birch ply, the loft feels less like an addition and more like a folded moment within the existing architecture. The wood envelops: soft grain, warm tones, and subtle shifts in surface that anchor the body and still the mind. Here, simplicity is not absence, but presence; a continuous surface that reads as a single breath through the space.

The room is both bedroom and study, a place to rest and to think, to look inward and outward. Its geometry frames views of sky and city while the material holds the light, diffusing it gently across ceilings and floors. This is not a shell of function; it is a space attuned to quiet inhabitation, where every turn of the head reveals the grain of wood, the seam of a joint, the comfort of a crafted edge.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

Today, the house belongs to two. The spaces are open; loose, adaptable, generous. Rooms without strict labels, where functions drift and overlap: dressing becomes music, music becomes cinema, each space lending itself to the extra activities we all wish we had space for. Here, function is given room to breathe.

Tomorrow, the family arrive. The house shifts, closes down, reshapes itself to hold more people, more happenings. Walls slide, thresholds appear, and the plan becomes cellular. Privacy is found, individual needs are met, the home contracts just enough to give each person their own place within the whole.

The joy of this house lies in its duality. It can expand to embrace, or contract to protect. The rooms that once held solitary joys become spaces that anticipate company. Always ready for the extra knock at the door, the table here is never too small, the welcome always made wide enough for one more.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

What is now a home used to be a fish and chip shop; and before that, whispered to be something else entirely. This layered past did not vanish with the change of use; it became the starting point for a new story, woven through the very geometry of the plan.

The memory of the shopfront; its horizontal sweep, its presence on the street; became our first line. From it, a series of lines travels through the house: in the thresholds, in the shifting volumes, in the way one room unfolds into the next. These lines do not merely define places; they invite movement, curiosity, and a quiet reflection on what a home might be when it carries the traces of what came before.

As the plan transforms from public to private, the choreography of space becomes legible in moments of display and concealment. What was once a threshold for passing trade becomes a threshold for living — a place to arrive, to pause, to look back and look forward at once. Within, domestic life is layered, not uniform: each room holds its own character, yet all are bound by the same disciplined threads that began at the street.

The beauty of this project is not in erasing history, but in revealing it; not crudely, but through a careful architecture of lines that make visible the tension between old and new. The house becomes a palimpsest: a home that honours its past, yet room by room, line by line, reshapes it into something quietly remarkable.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

There is a quiet generosity in this addition; a translation of family life into space, and of landscape into architecture. What appears at first as a gallery of forms and light unfolds into something more deliberate: a garden-facing orangerie rooted in the everyday rituals of home and season.

The room sits low and direct against the garden, as though it has grown from the soil itself. Its presence is measured and composed; calm in its lines, receptive to light, and attuned to the way a home breathes. Here, height is reclaimed not by volume alone, but by the clarity of proportion: a generous ceiling that allows light to take shape, and a threshold that invites movement outward as readily as it holds you within.

The orangerie looks out to green always; to planting, sky, and the changing seasons. In summer, the boundary between inside and outside dissolves; in cooler moments, the space becomes an embrace of warmth and shelter. Views are framed like a sequence of quiet canvases: garden, sky, courtyard, each unfolding gently through large apertures that locate daily life in relation to the landscape beyond.

Within, the room carries a nod to mid-century poise; not through overt referencing, but through a sensibility of restraint, proportion, and calm. The materiality is thoughtful and tactile, creating surfaces that reflect light without glare, that age with presence, and that give texture to moments of pause: a seat by the garden, a moment at the counter, a glance across the table.

This is a space that acknowledges its context; oriented to sun, open to breeze, generous in its embrace of the garden; and yet remains intimately connected to the life of the family that inhabits it. Here, daily routines are met with a sense of continuity and ease: the orangerie becomes a room of dwelling, of gathering, and of quiet observation.

In its simplicity there is depth; in its openness there is shelter. A modern orangerie that turns outward to the garden and inward to the day’s rhythms; a home that finds fullness not in formality, but in the poetry of use.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

From the street, A Home of Colour and Craft holds its Edwardian composure; brick, proportion, rhythm. Step inside, and the story begins to unfold: a sequence of rooms defined not by grandeur, but by colour, craft, and a generosity of light.

At the heart of the home, a new kitchen and garden room sit beneath skylights that draw daylight deep into the plan. The design plays with weight and lightness; a robust base of handmade materials supporting a frame that opens to the garden. Arches soften transitions, shaping views from one space to the next, while the green reveals and terracotta accents give each threshold its own sense of ceremony.

The palette throughout is carefully tuned; a conversation between bold and quiet. Dark cabinetry and marble worktops ground the room, while stained glass, painted joinery, and patterned wallpaper add moments of warmth and delight. Every piece has a hand to it: the turned handles, the brass fittings, the hand-cast tiles.

Each space has its own character but belongs to the whole. A green-framed door leads to a small garden of red brick and terracotta furniture; a modern echo of the house’s history. Upstairs, bathrooms continue the story: one bright and playful, another serene and reflective. Colour is used not to dominate, but to give depth, to catch light, to make the everyday feel intentional.

A Home of Colour and Craft is a study in balance; between old and new, pattern and plain, structure and ornament. It respects the hand of the maker, celebrates the hand of the homeowner, and finds its joy in the spaces where the two meet.

Photography by Adam Scott Images. 

To extend the kitchen, we dropped the level for height and drew on Italian inspiration: Renaissance and Tuscan. The clients gave clues from their home and social media styling, and set a vision of shared meals on a Tuscan veranda. We drew on the Italianate style of the terraced house using classic, perfectly proportioned Romanesque arches for framed views through house and garden. The repeated form drew on Raphael’s School of Athens (Pillars of knowledge). The space between is set for conversation: a relaxed, light, gathering space and a table as the centrepiece of family and intellectual life for sharing food and ideas.

SW4: A Cloistered House

WINNER! Urban Oasis Prize, New London Architecture Don’t Move Improve 2021

Shortlisted, AJ Architecture Awards 2021, Under £500k

Longlisted, Dezeen Architecture Awards 2021, Residential Rebirth

The restoration and extension of a Cubitt-built Georgian terraced house in a conservation area. The house was carefully given life having been left to ruin for many years. It retains the formal room arrangement over three storeys, stacking studies, bedrooms and bathrooms. This creates a line of defence between the street and the new extension to the rear.

Referencing Dutch courtyard paintings, traditional East Asian courtyard houses and monastic cloisters, the extension has a formal courtyard arrangement with the intent of creating a protected and quiet space at the heart of a family home.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Image by https://www.rchivers.co.uk/

SE5: Colour Plane

SELECTED AS ONE OF LONDON'S BEST HOME EXTENSIONS #DMI 2020

We started with the paintings on the wall. The works are by John Prentice (the owner's grandfather), an artist and engineer. Prentice has written about colour selection turning it into a language akin to a musical score in his thesis Colour Plane. He uses this theory of colour to tell stories.

We wanted the house to imbue these theories.

His paintings of natural and urban landscapes fill the walls of the house with their strong painterly brush strokes and rhythmic colour selection.

Our response is to use an eclectic but carefully chosen palette of materials and colours to give the house this painterly and textured quality. A main component of the design is a concrete and timber tree which rises from the garden. This tree branches across the back of a new kitchen hosting seats and a swing, framing views and collecting domestic spaces. Light mottles as it falls through these branches.The maker's mark (like the painter's) are left clear with finishes reflecting their engineered raw state: a soft impression of the built and natural. This is layered with strong colours lifted from the paintings and placed next to one another to help give backdrop to the home’s new stories.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

From the outside, this house might appear ordinary. But like the hidden intricacies of a Renaissance ceiling; where a simple vault reveals painted skies, or a measured façade gives way to sculpted detail; it offers more when you look closer. A touch of flourish, a quiet twist, elevates what could be simple into something altogether richer.

The brief was modest: a small space, a simple set of requirements, a tight budget. The task was to do more with less; to make everyday living feel special without extravagance. The response lies in a single gesture: the elevation of the ordinary.

The roof beams lift with an arch, breaking the orthogonal to open a view from kitchen to garden. A standard kitchen is reimagined, its backdrop enhanced by the framing of space. A window becomes not just light but a seat, a place to pause. The bathroom discreetly hides an additional shower. What appears to be walls and corridors conceal deep storage, even a larder.

At every turn, the expected gives way to the unexpected. A small trick, a hidden detail, a reconsidered edge. Each moment offers something more than it first suggests.

This project is not about size or budget, but about imagination. It is proof that even the most ordinary of briefs can carry within it surprise and delight. A house that, like a Renaissance surface that conceals wonder within its depth, makes the everyday feel more than enough.

How do you tie a piece of wood into knots? One way is to let it run, unbroken, into a staircase. Here, wood becomes the red carpet through the house: a continuous ribbon linking the open, social ground floor to the enclosed retreat above, where quiet rooms look outward to the sky.

Wood has been with us for as long as earth has been. Trees breathe life back into our lungs. They shelter us, warm us, and give us tools, furniture, frames for our lives. We use wood to climb, we rest upon it when we are tired, we lean against it, and it moulds to us in return. Rarely do we stop to think of it, yet it is always there; grounding us, bridging divides, creating the very surfaces we live upon.

Here, we pause to consider it. To honour it. The staircase becomes an act of thanks: a sculptural ribbon of wood, continuous and tactile, guiding hand and foot alike. When your palm reaches out at the end of the day, tired and ready for bed, the wood fills the hand. Gentle as a child, firm in its intent, it carries you upward.

Its warmth matches the blood. Its softness echoes the skin. Its strength holds you without question. Wood here is not just material; it is companion, guide, and host. The quiet constant of the home, tying everything together.

Turning to face the garden

The house fronts a busy arterial road in West London. The route to the train station is through the long garden at the back of the house. We have initiated a shift and reorientation of the house to face the back and formally address the garden. The walk through the garden should be seen as akin to a walk through the countryside - and its quilted fields.

This motif of a patchwork is taken through and into the house. Patterned and textured brickwork on the back wall was designed as the weavers loom as if creating a quilt (and a bouldering wall for the children!). As you enter the home, patchworked materials are stitched together to frame activity. Stitches and patterns are expressed in touches across all the finishes. The large family room is divided into smaller spaces by subtle shifts in materials, more or less refined depending on function. The effect fans out like pleated fabric

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

The owners of this home are both film makers. They curate and make images to tell a story. Our response to the brief to create an enlarged kitchen was to make an extension that allows display of imagery and artwork in different mediums.

The back of the dining room is a cabinet of curiosities, the courtyard was designed for the display of a larger piece of art (as filled with balloons), the shelf on the long wall is for a changing exhibition of paintings, the extended wall is for the projection of film. The window to the garden is a picture in its own right, the frame mimicking the framing of the art.

Microcement on the walls and floor is a simple palette to draw your eye to the art but befits a home; durable and warm. This continued palette gives the space a sculptural quality particularly as dappled light and shadows are cast across the space – a marked change from the dark and confined space that was there before.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

A growing family needed a larger kitchen and wanted a family room that opened up the garden - there was, however, a large tree which sat directly next to the existing kitchen.

It was loved by the family, they have enjoyed sitting under it in the summer, watching the seasons change against it but it was threateningly close to the house and blocking the light and views out.

Our response has been to create an extension which has been inspired by the feeling of sitting under a tree. Glimpsing the sky in different directions and with changing light as though looking up through its branches. The form of the roof, also allowed light to get to the back of the room.

Our brief was to create a space with a series of overlapping functions: a kitchen, a dining room, a snug for watching a flickering light (either fire or tv) and a garden room. To keep this open yet clearly demarked we used stepped levels between the spaces, and a shift in finishes.

The kitchen is elevated with a timber floor continuing the floor finish in the main house. The floor then steps down to the dining room and still further to the snug. The snug and the dining room are limestone finish which runs through to the garden. This emphasises the cutting into the solid ground with the tree growing above.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

http://www.turnerarchitects.co.uk/n5-peeling-back-the-layers

The house had previously been owned and lived in by a number of generations of the same family over more than half a century; it had become a repository for changing taste. As family members grew up and fashions changed, new decorative linings were laid over the old. As electricity was introduced, it was set in trunking fixed proud on the wall and wall papered over. Cohabiting happily were Victorian cornicing, 50's carpet, 60s bathroom finishes, 70s kitchen, 80s transformer wallpaper (the list goes on) we counted over thirty different patterns.It was colourful but also warm and familial and carried on every wall a reminder of what once went on inside.

The existing became the inspiration for the new. Our take on a new wallpaper was a lining of oak panelling. It was used as a new material to represent a new family and use, but also indicate a function.

The oak panelling dropped down next to the courtyard to create a temporary study, the oak panels open up in the hallway to create coat/shoe storage, acting as a bench and shelving in the kitchen. Whilst giving the rooms function, we were also wanting to create a home that could adjust to changing family needs.

We wanted to create views of rooms through rooms where family life could co-exist, each generation of a family acting with free will in the company of others.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

A library, under a tree, at the end of the garden.

The brief was for a study, spare room and storage for a growing family, where an extension to their flat was prohibitively complex. Planning required a metre hiatus from the boundary and so, to fit it all in, we looked to the heavens to create a space that gave them all they wanted: led by thought, and elevated by a heavy weight of books above, and the lightness of the open air above that. 

The design celebrates and values its foundations by using the permanence of concrete to create a sense of solidity that also performs very modern functions: a place for the brightly coloured plastic a young family collects. Using the metre set back, the raised planters provide void low-level storage, firmly grounded.

The roof is constructed from the cast of the foundations – the sheets of wood shuttering that created the cast for the concrete have been used to create the ceiling's beams. It forms a deliberate heavy block above you rather than hiding from the site’s constraints. The heaviness is the weight of learning and respect for the canon – but in looking up, the books themselves create colour and warmth, then up again the tunnelled light is uplifting.

In between, the garden and its more urban surrounds are welcome context seen through the deliberately simple, lightweight structure - creating a warm and friendly feel for a quintessentially family addition.

Throughout, the aesthetic has come from the making, with no effort to hide the simplicity of the materials: concrete, ply. There are day joints in the concrete showing the different pours, shuttering marks from the form work, simple valve taps and roll marks in the steels.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

Shortlisted for the best new home improvement project in London! #DMI2017

This was an interesting brief.

Our client wanted to have a separate living room and kitchen, but also wanted to open up the downstairs space for when the wider family got together.

This small, locally listed cottage didn't have a lot of space. 

We designed and built a moveable piece of furniture, which sits in the middle of the ground floor, and can be moved to one side when the family wants to use the open-plan space.

It has an oven and fridge on one side. The other sides are a study, bookshelves and cupboards.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

This was a typical, quite rundown Victorian house in a conservation area.

We remodelled and extended the house, and kept a lot of the original, handmade features or used them as inspiration for what we added. 

Tiles, floorboards and metal railings were given a modern twist.

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

This is a large, Victorian house on the end of a terrace. It was draughty in winter and too hot in the summer. We completely refurbished the house, and created light, open spaces. 

We retained some of the original Victorian design intent by keeping the kitchen and utility room (the 'services') separate from other rooms (the 'served'). And elsewhere, we didn't knock through lots of walls to create a big open-plan space. Instead, we kept different rooms and spaces for different uses.

We made more room in the loft by changing the shape of the roof, and turned two small rooms into a large master suite, dressing room and bathroom.

We reconfigured the ground floor and extended it into the garden.

We made the kitchen bigger and placed it at the heart of the home. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com

"Here is true architectural purity… nothing but yellow London brick and unselfconscious self respect... Roupell Street, answers with a wavy parapet...On one level there is no finer architectural effect in London."
Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Book of London. 

We have created a number of light-weight glazed additions to this street of Grade 2 Listed properties. Carefully respecting the existing historic fabric (early Georgian) the new additions link otherwise fragmented plans, creating outside rooms and opening kitchens up to underused and poorly accessed gardens. These projects are good examples of 'quiet' architecture where a series of small interventions ensure that the character of the existing houses are celebrated whilst also updating them to reflect the modern requirements of the current occupants. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com/Turner Architects

This was a two-storey rear extension and interior refit to create a beautiful and homely space. 

We spent a lot of time looking at how the family would use different parts of the house.

We designed for clarity and calm, and to enhance the natural flow of the home.

For example, we built recessed curtains, which are hidden when they are pulled aside. 

Images by www.adamscottimages.com