Home Truths: The height of good taste

Cheryl Markosky meets the architect Terry Pawson

Terry Pawson lives with his wife and two sons in a Mediterranean-inspired four-storeyed house that he built himself in Wimbledon, south-west London

As an architect building your own house, you need to make up your mind about precisely what you want. You have lots of ideas, but in the end you must be absolutely clear in your thinking. In fact, the difficulty of this particular site made the decisions easier. The main challenge was whether I was going to make the house a statement about what I believed in, architecturally – as it was inevitable that my own house would be judged more critically than a public building.

"I've lived in Wimbledon for 17 years in various houses. Eight years ago my wife and I were struggling to find a family home suitable for two small boys, when we came across a For Sale sign outside a converted coach house in Arthur Road. It was a two-bedroom cottage with no central heating, draughty metal frame windows, and subsidence that needed underpinning – but at least it had a good garden.

"At the time we bought it, we had no intention of rebuilding. We lived in it for a couple of years, but when the subsidence problem got worse, it became obvious that the only sensible way forward was to take it down and start from scratch.

"The site would be typical of a three-bedroom Victorian terrace, or even narrower. It is just over five metres, or about 17 feet, wide and there is a two-metre slope from front to back. But the more difficult the challenge, the greater the imaginative response. It forces you to think laterally, in different ways. The planning took about a year, and the building phase five years.

"It took such a long time because I managed the project personally in my spare time at weekends and in the evenings, hiring subcontractors as required. If we'd used one main contractor, it might have taken only a year. Unfortunately, in this country we've moved away from the concept of the master builder who designs and builds his own house himself. But I didn't want any compromises, and throughout the project my family were very supportive.

"The site dictated certain architectural decisions, in particular the use of daylight coming in from above. Light is important in all houses, especially daylight. In every space in this house, light comes at you from different directions. This creates a far richer quality and variety of light than you find in more traditional houses.

"As you approach the house, it appears tall and slim with the four-storey bedroom tower facing you. It's clad in English green oak, which seemed like the natural choice, as it stands next to a large oak tree. The tree was contributing to the subsidence, so putting in a basement level worked on a design level and helped correct the subsidence problem. When you go through the 3m-high front door, you find yourself in a hallway three storeys high – you can see all the way through to the back of the house where there is a sculpture niche above the dining area, with one of my wife's sculptures in it.

"The house is really a series of sliding spaces – it plays games with your senses. People walk round it and can't believe how big such a small space can feel. There are two staircases, so some even get lost and start going round again. The dining area is double height with the same slate floor running through into the terrace. The surprising thing about such a narrow house is the quality of light and space.

"It is influenced by Mediterranean architecture. For instance, the bathrooms are all wet rooms, and because we have under-floor heating everywhere, the floors dry off really quickly. Having no carpets or rugs challenges the conventional view of comfort. But the whole floor is warm, so putting down a rug would block the heat.

"The walls are all white and I've used concrete to create a textural contrast. People think it's quite tactile, even sensuous. The floors are all either slate or wood. The house isn't designed to have curtains, so there are blinds throughout. We've used modern furniture, but traditional pieces could look right if they were well chosen.

"One of the reasons it works so well as a family house is that it has lots of storage space. It keeps the clutter down. Each of the four bedrooms is on its own floor with its own bathroom, and as children do much more in their rooms than just sleep nowadays, we have created desks for computers so they can have their own space.

"Leading up from the master bedroom on the top floor is a roof terrace, where you can see north to Hampstead Heath and south to the Downs. The house was finished last spring and we only realised quite late on that we weren't actually going to live in it. My wife was ordained into the priesthood at about the same time, and as a residence goes with her new position, we have decided to sell the Arthur Road house. I really regret never having lived in it properly, but the imperative was to build it the right way.

"I think the greater the difficulty, the greater the imaginative challenge. When people ask me if this is my ideal house, I answer this is the ideal house for this site."

Terry Pawson's house is for sale at £1.4 million through Foxtons' Wimbledon office, 020-8605 2900

Terry Pawson Architects 020-8543 2577