The Victorian terraces in Queen's Park have a quiet dignity to them. At Hopefield Avenue, our proposal reworks one of these houses with that character intact, keeping what's good about it and adding a few clear moves of our own.
Rear garden view of Victorian terrace in Queen’s Park - arched extension by RISE Design Studio, architect West London.
The starting point is the arch. The existing bay window and entrance door both carry a subtle arched form, and we've taken that and run it through the house as a recurring motif. Arched openings link the old part of the house to the new, frame particular views, shape where the shade falls, and give the rear elevation a rhythm rather than a flat run of glass. Stone lintels and sills, painted white against the London stock brick, sharpen the composition and bounce more daylight inside.
The most useful move is also the least visible: we're lowering the internal ground floor level. Dropping the floor adds ceiling height, and that extra height changes how the ground floor feels far more than any decorative gesture would. It becomes a connected sequence of light-filled rooms, kitchen, dining, pantry, utility and cloakroom, with two home offices built into the plan.
Those two workspaces are a deliberate response to how people work now. They're set up for focus and a degree of separation from the rest of the house, rather than the laptop-on-the-kitchen-table arrangement most homes fell into.
A lightwell, carefully placed, pulls daylight down into the middle of the plan, which is usually the darkest part of a terraced house. Next to it, the canopy between the side and rear extensions has a circular opening cut into it so a small tree can grow up through the building. Between them, light and greenery reach the centre of the house rather than staying out at the garden edge.
This is biophilic design doing something practical rather than decorative: bringing daylight, planting and a view of the sky into the rooms people use most. The link between close contact with daylight and greenery and everyday comfort and wellbeing is well established, and here it's built into the fabric rather than added as a houseplant afterthought.
Upstairs, the bedrooms and ensuite are reconfigured for a calmer, clearer layout. The top floor is left deliberately loose: it works as a gym, a guest room or a study, depending on what the family needs at the time. Rooflights bring sky views into it and give it a sense of retreat at the top of the house.
The proposal sits within a conservation area, and it's meant to read that way. The arched rhythms, the chamfered reveals and the crisp white stone are drawn from the existing house and reinterpreted rather than copied. The aim is a home that reads as part of its street while clearly belonging to now, and that holds up as family life changes around it.
The useful thing about a project like this isn't the amount of space added, it's how hard each move works: the floor that buys ceiling height, the opening that brings in a tree, the arch that ties old and new together. If you're thinking about reworking a Victorian house in Queen's Park or nearby, we'd be glad to talk it through.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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