House and Studio Lambeth is a new building that architecture office Carmody Groarke has slotted into the brick shell of a Victorian warehouse in south London.
The house and studio is located on a long, narrow site that is landlocked by housing. Rather than clear the site, the London-based studio chose to work with the fabric of the old warehouse that remained. The new building simply slots inside.

"The client was very keen to keep all of the old walls and any remnants of the past within them," explained project architect Andrew House.
"Although structurally very challenging, as the walls were never designed to carry this additional weight, it helped with an already very complex boundary condition," he told Dezeen.
This idea of a brick "skin" became a running motif throughout the design. New areas adopt a sensitive brick exterior, but are lined internally with smooth concrete that occasionally reveals itself from behind the original brick walls.
At ground floor level, the footprint of the site is completely given over to office space, sitting off a dramatic, sky-lit concrete corridor.

Above, the living spaces are designed as a cluster of "pavilions", a series of individual units with different heights linked by a skylit internal street. A concrete stair connects the two levels.
Each of these small buildings, wrapped in brickwork but finished internally with concrete, has been designed according to the sensitivities of the surr...