Click to download this text as a pdf file

Two very different sides of Britain come together on a collision course in the unassuming, but featureless street where this House is built. The contested territory is in one of those comfortable, but anonymous suburbs of south-west London. The house in question, though comfortable, is anything but anonymous.

The story begins in the early 1960s when, what was, for the time, a startlingly modern house, was built on the same site. Years later, the owner's son moved into the house with his wife and, in the late 1980s, they asked David Chipperfield, then an emerging young architect, to remodel it. Chipperfield was called back ten years later to help them extend the house to cope with a larger family.

Chipperfield is now one of Europe's most eminent architects: known for his refined, but sensuous, essentially modern buildings. He designed the first Issey Miyake store in Britain, works with Dolce & Gabbana, and builds hotels in the United States for fashionable restauranteur, Keith McNally. Just as much at home with heavyweight cultural projects. Chipperfield is now drawing up a masterplan for Berlin's city museums, and designing new law courts in Salerno.

Back in south-west London, Chipperfield's old clients bought the house next door, demolished it, and asked him to design a replacement to give them the space they needed. The planners wanted it to look as though it were still a separate house, so as to leave the look of the street intact. David Chipperfield had to deal with the tricky problem of adding to a house he had already built with an extension that would function as part of a single house without looking as if it did so from the outside.

Most of the action in the house is away from the street. It backs onto a lush green playing field, and the bedrooms, living rooms and kitchen are aligned with views over trees and grass. From this side, it is possible to look from Chipperfield's earlier wing to the more recent addition and get a sense of what a modern house might look like.

On the street side, things are much quieter. Even a flat roof would have been too much for the local planners. Instead, Chipperfield designed a pitched roof, but by making it out of solid, very large slabs of slate, made it meet the planners' demands, yet look beautiful in an unexpected way.

After the first Chipperfield house was finished, its owners regretted not having documented its construction. They decided to rectify that with the second one. Before the builders started work, they installed three cameras - one on the roof of their own home, a second in front of the new house and a third behind it. Every day for seventeen months, a photograph was taken from each camera. Those images have been transformed into House, an online documentary of the building process in what the owner describes as, "an architectural soap opera".