City Solutions: Introduction

Town and Country build across the breadth of the UK and the USA, but nowhere is there as great a concentration of our buildings as can be found in central London; in particular within The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and The Borough of Westminster. We are confident this goes some way towards validating the quality of our design and build capabilities, because many of these installations must not only meet the exacting criteria of local authority conservation, but also satisfy the edict of the great inner London estates such as The Crown Estate and Grosvenor Estate.

The arrangement of Georgian and Victorian townhouses tend to follow a consistent theme of principal rooms arranged over multiple floors within the main body of the house, and flights of stairs and smaller rooms and domestic offices arranged off half-landings within a projecting wing at the rear of the house - the closet wing.

In recent years the fashion for re-modelling the raised and lower ground floors, thus creating large open-plan informal living spaces, has placed greater focus on incorporating the space between the closet wing and the adjacent party boundary. Originally conceived as open spaces to allow light through the windows of the rear elevations, what better design solution could one find than the delicate glazed framing consistent with the conservatory style. Correctly designed and detailed these often small structures will act as a light conduit to adjacent open-plan spaces, and provide a beautiful focal feature to the otherwise unadorned rear elevation.

Clearly not all of our city projects fall within this description, so click on the peripheral images and case studies to see these and other design solutions for similarly challenging urban spaces.

Click on the peripheral images and case studies to sample just a few of our beautifully designed projects.