Hither Lane

Once the site of a Gilded Age estate, this East End property is rebuilt around the principle of villeggiatura, a restful but active holiday from the city. A series of understated, modern houses and courts capture sight lines through a picturesque landscape featuring native topographies and notable collections of London planes and river birches.

We pursue a culturally-aware sense of building, informed by a site’s specific material reality and delivered through a conspiracy of impacts on eye and mind and body. A search for the critical picturesque drives Hither Lane’s architecture and landscape architecture.

Balancing Past and Present

A relationship between past and present carefully balances throughout this project, often seeking to make the project feel like it has been there for a long time. In a gesture to the site’s heritage, the knoll once occupied by the former estate is a focal point. The longest possible approach to the new house, along the north and east edge sets up an experience of undulating land, shrouded in canopy and shade, rising and gradually disclosing the house across the lawn on an articulated, level plateau.

A more precise and detailed corporal awareness of spatial order is pursued in the compound and its immediate gardens, which begin where the drive emerges from beneath its nearly continuous shaded canopy. Passage through repeated rows of honeylocusts, whose geometric alignment as a frame establishes the garden order, gives way to the contrast of open sky in the court, where single trees become familiar icons of canopy and shade.