Bathurst Mews House is a deep retrofit of a mid-terrace mews house in Bayswater, taken to the EnerPHit standard without losing the character that makes the street worth keeping.
Client: Mr + Mrs Beverley Birch
Location: Bayswater / Tyburnia, London, W2
Local Authority: Westminster Council
Plot Type: Urban
Project Type: Residential – Single Family Home
Internal Area (GIA): 151 sqm
Sustainability: EnerPHit
Bathurst Mews is a cobbled street behind the stuccoed avenues of Bayswater, built to house horses and carriages and now one of London's quieter residential pockets. Like most of the city's historic stock, the houses leak energy: solid walls, single glazing, cold bridges at every junction. This project keeps everything the street values about the house and rebuilds everything it can't see, to the EnerPHit standard, the retrofit version of Passivhaus.
The envelope is wrapped in insulation and sealed as one continuous airtight layer, with triple-glazed timber windows throughout and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery supplying fresh, filtered air with almost no heat loss. Solar panels sit on the roof, out of the street's sight. The modelling points to an 80 to 85% reduction in energy use, with steady year-round comfort in place of cold winters and stifling summers.
The materials are natural throughout, chosen so the nineteenth-century fabric can keep managing moisture the way it always has: lime plasters and limewash finishes over the new build-ups, limestone floors at ground and basement level, and reclaimed timber where cladding is called for. A sculptural stair winds through the section from the basement to a new planted roof terrace, pulling daylight down through the plan, with a rooflight in the pitch and a sunken stair opening onto the terrace itself.
From the cobbles, the house reads as it always has: original brickwork, sash-style windows, the modest scale that makes the mews what it is. Inside, it performs like a new building. The project is a working demonstration that heritage housing and low-energy performance are not in tension, and that the way to keep an old building is to give it another century of use.