Words Kate Jacobs
Photography Elliot Sheppard

Many architects will tell you that some projects seem to stay with you. For Phil Coffey, founder and director of multi-award-winning practice Coffey Architects, and its homes brand, Coffey Residential, a good example is Hidden House in Clerkenwell. This inventive little project attracted plenty of design press on completion back in 2017 and featured on many awards shortlists, as well as a Grand Designs 'House of the Year' episode.

Now, the story has come full circle for Phil, as he’s living in – and loving – the house he designed for another architect. “Because the story means something to me, I feel embedded in the place. It was a special project for the whole practice, we still joke about who actually designed it.”

At the time of Hidden House’s inception, Coffey Architects – currently celebrating their 20th year – were based in the old Clerkenwell House of Detention vaults, located under the Hidden House site. Back then it was just a caretaker’s shed, adjoining an old Victorian school. The developer who was converting the school into apartments asked Phil to come up with something creative for the 72 square metre caretakers’ shed – a challenging site hidden away on three sides by a Grade II-listed brick wall.

Having bagged planning permission with Phil’s design, the developer then sold the site, which was bought by a Turkish architect and his graphic designer wife. They loved Phil’s design and worked with Coffey Architects’ team member Ella Wright to get the design built, before living here very happily for six years. Because of his connection with the house and clients, Phil kept in touch and, when they mentioned that they were moving back to Istanbul, it chimed serendipitously with his need for a new place – his 27th-floor Old Street rental apartment having been put on the market.

“I’m a keen photographer so the view in my last place was incredible, but I felt disconnected from the city.” While many an architect designs their own home, it’s more unusual to end up living in a space created for someone else, but Phil doesn’t find it strange. “We’re not trying to do ‘idiosyncratic’, we want to create timeless architecture that’s built to last. Because our work tends to add a lot of value, our houses often end up on the market and it’s interesting to see that the new owners don’t tend to change things.”

As with much inspiring architecture, this house’s most striking features are a reaction to the constraints of the site. “With any project, you have the client, the site and the architect, and one generally has the strongest voice. In this case, it was the site,” Phil recalls. The surrounding wall meant that conventional windows would only be possible in one corner of the building and here they’re vast, offering views of richly planted gardens, both a modest private courtyard and shared communal space. But the main source of light is via seven ocular roof lights – glass-topped coffers in each of the ceilings. Continuing the ‘hidden’ theme, the frames sit out of sight, creating a monastically simple look.

“We could only get planning permission for a single storey, so it was the only thing we could do and we made the most of it!” he says, gesturing to the light flooding in from above into the main space. “Because of the design, it doesn’t feel like a roof or a ceiling, it disappears and gives the room this sense of lightness.”

The team designed the space around the path of the sun, and now Phil can fully reap the benefits of this meticulous planning, from the morning sun slanting into the kitchen as he makes his coffee, to sitting in the living area in the evening, enjoying the light filtering through the neighbouring plane trees. Light is something of an obsession for this practice, for whom ‘living in light’ is an ethos, while Phil is currently writing a book about light and our connection to the environment. “Our best memories are normally in amazing light. It’s about designing for moments rather than a constant.”

With light playing such a key role here, the material palette is pared-back, balancing white walls and polished concrete with the natural warmth of American white oak. Concrete was used for the fire surround-cum-bench, kitchen splashback and bathroom shelving, as well as for the floor, where it was poured in sections that align with the ceiling coffers and wall panels, zoning each area and creating a subtle sense of geometry. “Growing up, concrete was a horror, it meant Runcorn shopping centre for me. When I was 21 though, I saw Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum and I cried, it was the first time I’d really ‘felt’ architecture and I finally saw the beauty of concrete. It’s still my favourite building.”

Echoing the tones of the concrete, all the hardware here is in stainless steel. “Many houses suffer in the final stages of construction, where people start trying to save money on things like taps, but the things you’re touching are the most important. Here everything feels robust and tactile. As a practice, we always try to work with these kinds of materials.”

Although this is a small space, there’s no sense of confinement here. The design process began by allocating enough space to the main living-dining-kitchen room, then apportioning what was left to the two bedrooms and two bathrooms, all of which manage to feel distinctly generous by central London standards. “We based the size of each room on how long you’d spend in it.”

It might seem counter-intuitive but Phil puts the sense of space down to the abundant storage here, where almost every oak wall panel disguises a cupboard, and kitchen gadgets like the toaster and kettle are concealed in a cabinet to avoid visual clutter. “It’s a case of using tertiary space to create primary space. It feels so spacious because there’s plenty of room to store everything out of sight. We spent a lot of the budget on joinery and there was a lot of spatial planning, a change of 100mm can make a big difference in a smaller space.”

The house still contains all the furniture that the practice custom-designed, including the dining table that comfortably seats eight, but slots into a niche to free up more room when it’s just Phil and his girlfriend. “It’s a very social space, we’ve been having a lot of dinner parties, so we tend to leave it out." Just as flexible is the kitchen island, which is fitted with castors; while a long console table, with storage, demarcates a walkway behind the contemporary sofa.

Phil is pleased that the house is proving to be so liveable, although he ruminates, “I don’t love the process of converting the guest bed into a sofa, perhaps that’s something I would change.” Other than that, the house seems only to have improved with the patina of age, although Phil likes to get up onto the roof every six weeks or so to keep the roof lights spotless. Life here is good. “Ever since I moved to London, Clerkenwell feels like ‘my’ place so I feel very at home and, after living in a skyscraper, I’m really enjoying the gardens here. I’m connected to nature, with my feet on the ground.”