After leaving their compact flat – sold by us in 2017 to Holly Swayne – Emma and Ross Perkin of Emil Eve architects took on a more substantial project to house their growing family: a three-storey Victorian house in Stoke Newington’s conservation area. Their renovation installed bespoke joinery, a two-storey extension and an L-shaped kitchen/garden arrangement to create flexible space for family life. We caught up with them to hear how they did it.

Ross: “Our second child was on the way and we just didn’t have enough space. It was a beautiful little flat that we put a lot of effort into, but it was time to move on.

“We managed to find this, which needed a lot of work – the architects’ dream. Everything was the wrong way round: the kitchen was in the basement area at the front, looking out to a dark lightwell and the bathroom was in one of the biggest rooms in the house – it was clearly a bedroom!”

Emma: “It was really grim and grotty. The house had been a bedsit so someone had put a bath right in the middle of the bedroom and wrapped wallpaper around the base of it. It was just horrible.

“The house has been on the market for quite a long time because I think it was hard for people to see how it could work. It was also weirdly arranged, with a small dark bedroom opening onto the garden, where there was a semi-outdoor loo – none of it made sense.”

Ross: “We did the classic architect thing of spending evenings and weekends designing a scheme for the house, right down to the smallest detail, before we had even exchanged, which is so the wrong way to do it!

“We were going to do a straightforward single-storey extension but when we moved in and lived here for a while we started making changes, based on the light, the views available and the orientation.

“The space inside was good, but theres always going to be a compromise somewhere, especially in our wage bracket. Here it was the garden – its not massive. But it is well orientated, so we realised quite quickly it would make a good courtyard space.

“We came up with the idea of an L-shaped extension on the ground floor, to catch more of the light and views out, and to more closely integrate the outdoor space with the kitchen. And we went for an extension upstairs as well, to add a bathroom of the first floor and create a nice little roof terrace on top of it, accessed on the second floor.”

Emma: “So, instead of having one rolling lawn we’ve got these distinct outside spaces. And, since moving in, weve designed and built a community garden in a parking space at the front as part of the ‘Hackney Parklets’ initiative, which means, although we’re on a little urban street, we feel connected to the outside. It feels like you’re immersed in it when you’re here.”

Ross: “It’s a bit of a cliché to say you want to bring the outside in but for a lot of people living in Victorian houses in London, you can see why they say it. They are normally long and thin, and feel disconnected from the living space.