Specifiers Journal 2016

Victorian Terrace, Maida Vale
Daniele Petteno Architecture Workshop
In the centre of London, at the upper
floors of a Monumental Victorian
Terraced building, a Grade II listed unmodernized
maisonette apartment,
has been fully re-designed and
retrofitted to achieve the highest
living standards and provide all the
comforts of a contemporary living.
The property is in London ‘Maida
Vale’, a mostly residential
Conservation Area within the
Westminster City Council, and
consists of a three-storey top floors
apartment, which faces a public
road at the front and a beautiful
private communal garden, enclosed
by similar residential buildings, at
the rear.
This area of Maida Vale has an
extreme elegance, and buildings,
although their monumental nature,
appears to be anyway at the human
scale. I was impressed since the
first time I walked around these
streets, and a few dualities gave
me essential inspirations for the
project: the gentle contrast between
the more rigorous elegance of the
building fronts on the main roads
and the honest chasteness of their
rears, which generates the privacy
given by the similarity against the
greater openness toward the shared
green areas; the research of the light
through big openings, the view of a
more ‘urban’ London through the
roofs on one side and a more natural
and cosy scenario on the other side.
The project layout is based on a
transition that moves from the
recovery of the cellular floor plan
typical in these kind of dwellings, at
the third floor (entrance level) toward
a more open and contemporary
layout at the upper floor and the
mezzanine. A transition, that, both
for will and for need, required a
full interior refurbishment with
complete interior remodelling of
the spaces, structural strengthening
and installations, full technological
upgrade and redecoration.
92 SPECIFIERS JOURNAL