‘My first thought was to have the whole thing be a swimming pool’: the basement refurb that optimised space to the max

Excavation in modern architecture has a bad rap these day, but when furniture designer James Shaw bought a mini plot of land close to Columbia Road flower market in east London, he realised he would have to build down if he wanted to turn it into a home.
The result, developed with architect Nicholas Ashby, is an extension of James’s experimental, colourful product design – and an example of how to make even the most awkwardly sized plot stylish.
“The space had been vacant since 1860,” says James, who shares the house with his partner, the curator and author Lou Stoppard, their one-year-old daughter Clark and cat Rupert. “It came with serious planning issues. A new house here couldn’t block any light to the existing adjacent ones, and anything visible above ground had to look like the rest of the row – a handsome Victorian terrace. I was the only bidder. It’s a tiny plot, and to create rooms we had to go right up to every edge – each wall here is the end of a neighbour’s garden.”
The result? A yard, bedroom and minuscule hallway at ground level, then a curved staircase leading to a basement lounge, kitchen, bathroom and – incredibly – a small open space and an even smaller pool.
Economy of space has been used as an advantage: instead of a sofa, built-in seating tailored to an odd corner shape maximises the lounge, as does Shaw’s eye for colour. The interior is full of his creations: the bedposts are topped by surreal pears made of colourful extruded, recycled plastic. The bright palette extends to a pale blue Corian kitchen island that, Lou says, “brings the colour of the sky into a space where you can’t actually see it”, and a curved handrail along the staircase that Shaw made in situ.
Other elements in the house make it a work of art in its own right. “Nicholas called me at 6am one morning during construction,” he says. “They were casting the concrete for the kitchen ceiling, and he wanted to set something in it. We decided on an old iPhone 5. So, there it is, fixed for ever – a weird black mirror that will date the house to the particular moment when it was put into the concrete.”
Lou and James weren’t together when the house was first designed, but their relationship shaped the way it looks today. Lou has brought her curatorial eye to the art on the walls, including paintings by John Sheehy and Guendalina Cerruti, and they plan to tweak the layout to give Clark her own bedroom space.
The couple intend to keep the double-height aspect of the basement but extend the floor space above it to create a second bedroom. There’ll be chaos, they say, but the worst of the construction is behind them and it hasn’t been financially ruinous – many of the best aspects of the decor involve recycling found or inexpensive materials. The mosaic bathroom floor is made out of tile samples, which channels the graphic style of textile artist Anni Albers, and kitchen and bedroom wall surfaces are engineered wood. They have also made a feature of the raw breeze blocks and plaster throughout.
“It took a very long time to do all this,” says Shaw. “The planning process was two and a half years in itself. And the build took much longer than expected.” It was five years from discovering the plot to moving in, with lots of issues to negotiate with neighbours’ boundary walls. Stoppard says: “There was a point at which I said, ‘This has to be a home now, not a building site – I want all the tools put away at the end of every day’.”
Still, in a way, it’s the slow progress of the project that has allowed the space to grow with this new family. Its original concept didn’t accommodate a lounge, let alone a baby. “My first thought was to have the whole thing be a swimming pool, with balconies above it that you could inhabit,” says Shaw. There’s still a brilliant folly, in the shape of a plunge pool in the outdoor basement terrace. “It’s not heated yet,” he says, “but we’ll fix that when we work on the rest. And, of course, we need to make it child-proof. But it was one of the first things I knew I wanted here. I would still have loved a full-sized pool. I really love swimming.”