A Dark and Dreary Welsh Row House Gets a Dazzling Reinvention
A renovation by Benjamin Hale Architects presents "a template for bringing Cardiff houses into the 21st century."
A renovation by Benjamin Hale Architects presents "a template for bringing Cardiff houses into the 21st century."
Just as their American and Australian counterparts flock to New York or Melbourne to start careers, freshly minted architects in the United Kingdom often head to London to earn their bona fides. Yet many of these young professionals eventually realize that the day-to-day business of a global city isn’t quite as glamorous as advertised.
For the Welsh-German architect Benjamin Hale, the realization that London architects, "rather than looking farther afield [for inspiration], were looking over each other’s shoulders," compelled him to open his own practice in both the British capital as well as his hometown of Cardiff, Wales, where he felt he could exercise his creative license more unselfconsciously.
Before architect Benjamin Hale renovated this 1899 row house in Cardiff, Wales, for Myfanwy and Tom Shorey, a rear corner of the dining room led to a garden conservatory. By expanding and reprogramming the conservatory, Hale has connected the dining room to the kitchen.
Pierce Scourfield
At the start of the pandemic, as Hale began setting up his eponymous studio in Cardiff, homeowners Myfanwy and Tom Shorey were just finishing six years of saving for a ground-floor renovation in the city’s Roath neighborhood. Constructed in 1899 and largely original in condition, the Shoreys’ Victorian row house steps down from three floors facing the street to a single-story utility room in the back and has an L-shaped footprint.
Steps lead down from the reception room into the kitchen. A run of cabinets with an integrated sink directly abuts the threshold between the rooms, and this new wash/prep space terminates in a door to the rear garden.
Pierce Scourfield
Because a previous owner had modernized the rearward kitchen without altering the building’s overall layout, "everything was in the wrong place," Myfanwy, who manages a local art gallery, recalls of the deep, warren-like plan. "I had a vision of balancing what I needed and being sympathetic to the house."
Tom adds that that vision is not commonplace for Cardiff. "People are buying three walls and opening up the rear, and they tend to stick on glass boxes," says the travel entrepreneur. (He and Myfanwy also recently cofounded Hunant, which produces fitted bedsheets patterned on traditional Welsh tapestry blankets.)
Italian terrazzo distinguishes the conservatory-cum-kitchen from the house’s original footprint, which Hale floored in white oak. The architect worked with a local welder to produce the Cumbrian slate–topped cooking island seen in the foreground.
Pierce Scourfield
See the full story on Dwell.com: A Dark and Dreary Welsh Row House Gets a Dazzling Reinvention
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