Jonathan Woolf and Bharat Patel's radical reimagining of a north London semi-detached house calls into question all our notions about suburban living, writes Rowan Moore
Suburbia is the place people love to mock. It is the place whence writers and artists used to escape, so that they could make a career scouring its pettiness and restrictions. It is reviled by planners and architects. Suburbia, in which four-fifths of British people live (depending on how you define it), is accused of being stifling, ugly, boring, antisocial and environmentally destructive.
Planning policy, led by Lord Rogers's Urban Task Force of over a decade ago, has championed the opposite of suburbs: compact, dense, "vibrant" cities on the continental model. Now, though, there is a backlash or, rather, something more suburbanly genteel. A back-waft, perhaps, or a crooked little finger raised in a somewhat adversarial manner.
Paul Barker's recent book The Freedoms of Suburbia praised its "blessedly anarchic form". Trendy young architects now point out the virtues of the semi-detached and teach students at architecture schools to study the hidden social structures of suburbia. The mayor of London set up an Outer London Commission to support those commuter zones that largely got him elected. The country's smarter property developers are exploring what a contemporary suburban home could be.
The first purpose of the Painted House, in an outer area of north-west London, is to be a home for a family of 11 people spread over three generations, but it is also what its architect, Jonathan Woolf, calls a "model" for other developments. It shows what a large semi-d in a leafy avenue can be.
The Painted House occupies the exact footprint and volume of a pair of 1920s semi-detached houses that previously stood on its site, but is different in almost every detail from the suburban norm. Its owners had wanted a contemporary, flat-roofed house similar to others Woolf has designed, but local residents and planners insisted it follow the gabled, bay-windowed form of its neighbours.
This it now does, but without decorative trimmings. Its front is simplified and all brick, provoking a couple of double-takes. Is it an interwar semi or a sculptural image of one, a late derivation of Rachel Whiteread's concrete houses? And is it one house or is it two? One of the two front doors is half-concealed, allowing you to read it as a single dwelling, but the symmetrical pairing of its gables and bays makes it look like two houses.
The exterior is on the severe side and were it not for a certain quality in the brick and the details it might look like an austere postwar reconstruction of a doodlebug victim. The real surprise is when you go inside. Instead of a crabby, tricky assembly of parlours and halls, you find an expansive array of simple, generous, white-walled, light-filled rooms.
It all revolves around the kitchen which, in such a large family, is in use all day. Around here, different satellites orbit: a gym, a home office and the bedrooms and suites occupied by two brothers and their wives, parents and children. There is also a shrine to their Jain faith. Thanks to ample storage, all is exceptionally tidy, but not oppressively so, even in the children's rooms. "I think kids become tidy if you give them the right spaces," says one of the brothers.
There is, as yet, no art on the walls. "It's quite difficult to agree on art when there are 11 different opinions," he says.
The basic style is Shoreditch Loft Contemporary. It is superficially much as decent metropolitan architects have been turning out these last two decades, but it has a looseness, or a lack of uptightness, that sets it apart. On the top floor, the hipped, gabled roof of the exterior is allowed to shape a rich interior of triangles, slopes and facets that Woolf calls both "Elizabethan" and "well-mannered Frank Gehry".
Nor does the design fetishise materials, as other minimalist architecture does, as with rare pieces of oak, or pietra serena or Carrara marble imported at great expense. "People now can have whatever materials they want," says Woolf, "and they do. People use materials as a statement. But I wanted to achieve dignity and character without resorting to the emporium of world materials on our doorstep. I was just interested in form and paint."
This is why it is called the Painted House and Jonathan Woolf's approach contributes to the livability of the place and its absence of preciousness. As to whether it is one house or two, the question remains open. It is currently inhabited as a single, diffuse spread of differently proportioned and oriented rooms, but it has two staircases and a wall down its middle and it could easily be made back into two houses, if desired and required.
The question about suburbia is whether it is conformist and controlling or, as Barker claims, liberating. Is it a place of pointless etiquette and social codes, of competitive respectability and petty restriction, or does it allow people to do whatever they want, to be poets, or white witches, or the swingers of suburban myth?
The fact that the Painted House struggled with the planners suggests that conformity had the upper hand, but the virtues of the completed house are its openness to change and the freedom it offers to inhabit it in many different ways.
As to whether it is a model for others, its success is helped by its ample size – at about 750 square metres, it is four or five times as large as the average house. But its virtues of flexibility, adaptability and diversity within simplicity should be applicable anywhere.
• This article was amended on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 because we omitted to credit Bharat Patel as one of the people who "reimagined" the Painted House in conjunction with Jonathan Woolf.
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