The owner has hosted regular Open House weekends. Below are some extracts from the texts that he has prepared for visitors:

"Space, daylight and outlook were leading design determinants. Additionally, I have wanted the building to express continuity with the past, to relate well to its surroundings, and to enhance the local scene.

The aesthetic is modernist, but use is made of not only new but also old materials, particularly reclaimed bricks which help the building to relate to its surroundings. A proportion of the bricks, together with the setts (mostly from the Thames foreshore) are found objects which encapsulate much London history.

The principal design constraint is the adjacent four-storey housing block. In response, the building has been kept low to the south and light-pulling courtyards have been created in the middle of the east and west sides. Direct sunlight enters the large east-facing bedroom window in early morning and the west courtyard from lunchtime onwards. Oblique evening sunlight touches the north façade in summer.

As well as vistas within and from the building, of special concern to me is its impact in terms of tones, planes, masses and the defining of spaces. The old character of Hales Street (once a Georgian street) and streets parallel to it was to a great extent destroyed by post-war redevelopment. A desire to recover street character has guided the treatment of the Hales Street elevation. Industrial connotations (galvanised steel, blue engineering bricks mixed in, and the exclusion of timber and paint as facing materials) reflect personal taste but also refer to uses historically located close to the High Street.

Post-war redevelopment paid no attention to the long established character of the area. To the modest degree possible, this building seeks to make amends, and to pull together the townscape with its mass, proportions and tones. It embodies various references to 19th-century London functionalism - buildings such as workshops, small warehouses and mews stabling."

An extensive article on the building, written by Chris Foges, was published in Architecture Today in 2005. Below are some extracts from the piece:

"It was always the aim of the project to create a building of indeterminate identity, neither identifiably domestic nor commercial, a piece of contemporary architecture whose references are Cambridge brutalism and London vernacular.

The facing bricks and floor tiles were sourced from salvage yards; the setts in the courtyards were scavenged from the Thames foreshore over many years; the marble splash-backs behind the bath were found in a Fulham street and ported home in a taxi… The interest in salvaged materials is not simply economic: it is also about a kind of contextualism.

The result is an enigmatic building, that is both of its time and place, and somehow adrift from them."