Tony Fretton Architects

House for Anish Kapoor and family . London

photos: Helene Binet

The location of the house we designed for Anish Kapoor and his family occupies an intriguing 50m long 8m wide site, which extends beneath an apartment building deep into backlands in Chelsea.

To build a family house here with abundant light and spectacular spaces required some ingenuity.

Our design provides a continuous space in the ground floor with rooms arranged around a star shaped court open to the sky, which in the summer will provide a space for delightful open air dining. From the middle of the plan a stone stair leads up to a first floor, which is smaller in length and also divided by a courtyard.

The choice of materials is unusual: polished stainless steel metalwork to reflect light, combined with two British stones, Hopton Wood and Mandale Fossil, that were used in British Modernist sculpture and architecture, and which both have a very beautiful figure.

Books and artworks are a significant part of the scheme and are given places in the plan where they take on a role of enriching and giving meaning to the spaces.