丨英国丨Apricot Square

Architects:Apricot Square

Area:156m²

Year:2025

Photographs:Guilmar Baldoni

Category:Residential Architecture,Houses,Renovation

Lead Team:Juan Guilmar Baldoni

Design Team:Apricot Square

Country:United Kingdom

Text description provided by the architects. Fairmead House is a renovation of a late 20th-century modernist bungalow at the edge of the wild meadows in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Originally built in the 1970s, the house has been reimagined through quiet, precise interventions: gestures that bring new clarity to daily life while improving performance and deepening its connection to the landscape.

The project reflects a generational shift in how we live and what we value: a slower rhythm, closer proximity to nature, and a home that balances calmness with metropolitan sensibility. Without extending the footprint, the work focuses on proportion, light, and material presence to unlock the potential of the existing building. Transformation here is about subtlety, with a focus on experiential richness. Selected partitions were removed to create open connections between the kitchen, dining, and living areas, reinforcing the home's horizontal nature.

New single-pane aluminum windows reframe the house's engagement with its setting. These openings read almost as still lives. As one moves through the house, the framings shift and realign, producing a gallery-like sequence of moments that reveal the landscape as changing compositions. Oak cabinetry and exposed timber beams bring a natural warmth that resonates with the meadows. A pale-pink biopolymer resin floor and the house's geometry introduce an abstract counterpoint.

Light is treated as a material in its own right. Variations in surface and color generate tonal shifts across the plan, while pendants and wall fixtures add warmth and orientation at night. The result is a house bright and open by day, intimate and grounded by night.

The clients, a young family with two children, played a central role in the making of the home, resulting in a space that holds both professional clarity and personal resonance. Fairmead House is about balance, between city and nature, past and present, precision and feeling.

Project gallery