Set within Highgate’s Conservation Area, Wembury Mews occupies a former service lane connecting Wembury Road and Langdon Park Road. The site formed part of Highgate’s nineteenth-century brick fields, where London Clay was extracted, moulded, and fired to supply the expanding city.​This industrial substratum remains latent within the mews. Its material past, the shaping and firing of clay, is present in the construction and renewal of the site. Positioned between village and city, the mews occupies an in-between condition. From its upper levels, views open south-east across London, situating the house within the wider geography of the metropolis. At ground level, the mews is contained: a quiet recess within the conservation area. 

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The mews reads as a palimpsest. Its typology has evolved through incremental change, with single and paired dwellings negotiating scale, privacy, and light within a tight urban grain. It is an environment shaped by adaptive reuse, where continuity is maintained through careful reinvention characteristic of Highgate’s conservation ethos.​ No. 7 makes this continuity explicit. Conceived as both home and studio, the project draws directly from the site’s material history. Constructed in clay and lime, it recalls the substance from which the ground was first formed. 

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The building reorients the urban block, linking the higher Archway Road with the lower Wembury Mews. Arranged across three floors, the volume opens towards south-east views across the city, while its southern flank frames St Augustine’s Church, Highgate. The two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-storey house is economical in its use of space and material. Upper floors exploit the height afforded by the split pitched and flat roof arrangement: a large-format dormer introduces generous ceiling height to the rear bedroom, while flush eaves and a flat roof to the front keep the volume compact within the mews.​The mews façade is robust and carefully proportioned. Without applied decoration, its simplicity is enriched through subtle inflection. Terracotta red brickwork, lime render, and flush pointing frame generous openings. A tapered recess forms a sheltered porch, while a planting bed and bench address the shared space of the mews. Above the parapet, a large opening introduces light into a double-height upper-floor atrium.

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The rear façade adopts a similar stacked, robust composition. Expressed column and beam elements frame two openings onto the rear yard and passage. A large-format dormer defines the flank façade, reading as a tower-like element that introduces volume to the rear bedroom, while an adjacent steeply pitched roof projects to form a third-floor terrace. Despite its compact footprint, the building’s form and expression remain taut and articulate.

Internally, a tightly set stair forms a spatial anchor. Constructed from lye-washed Douglas fir, the balustrade acts as a canted beam, allowing the stair to self-support. Composite load-bearing ceramic blockwork is left exposed, with lime plaster providing a smooth datum. Lime-pointed quarry tiles echo the materiality of the ceramic walls. Timber joists, set at tight centres, form the soffit, while larger CLT beams define key apertures within the section.

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With https://www.turnkeycontractors.co.uk/

Due for completion Spring 2026