For Danish architect Johan Hybschmann, a modern house was key to how he wanted to live. “Victorian houses are nice to look at, but I don’t want to live in one,” he laughs. “The idea of home is dated in the UK, period features are considered quality, but modern homes from the 60s and 70s, deemed perhaps ugly, are more suited to modern living.”
We are standing in his immaculate kitchen with his wife, Anita Freeman, a clinical psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Their home was built in the 1970s and stands on a street in east London among a hodge-podge of Victorian houses and midcentury estates, built on bomb sites following the blitz of the Second World War.
The couple are firm believers in owning only what you need, but ensuring it is the best you can afford. Anita was brought up by her grandparents in north London with very little and has a deep appreciation for everything she has worked for, while Johan, a director of Archmongers architects, grew up in Denmark, where he was taught to value brilliant design – and together they make a compelling team. “We are grateful for what we have and, aware of privilege, we don’t take anything for granted. Trendy is a dangerous thing,” says Johan. “Buying something that is well made, that will last forever and can be fixed is what good design is all about.”
The stainless steel kitchen is a case in point. Italian made, it is designed to withstand decades of battering and long nights of feasting. “It is robust,” says Anita, whose childhood helping her granddad in his pub kitchen, alongside her twin sister, instilled a familiar connection to the practicality and functionality of industrial features.
Their mutual appreciation of durable but beautiful objects continues throughout their home, which they share with Luca, their seven-year-old son. The ground floor is made from terracotta red brick tiles that flow outside, connecting the entire space from the front door into the garden. Thanks to Anita’s attentions it’s bursting with pink heads of echinacea, and a small pond poised for frogs. “I am slightly in love with brick floors, they are indestructible. It’s like continuing the walls on to the floor,” says Johan.
The colour palette is equally considered and minimal, the vermilion tones from the tiles tying simply with the primed oxide paint on the steel frame used in the extension and left exposed. “We like to be honest to the material and the structures,” explains Johan, who teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. A galvanised steel staircase with a gleaming red banister leads to the first floor where original pine floorboards were recovered and restored, alongside the simple galvanised steel balcony rail.
Johan and Anita were the only people to put an offer on the house. “Even the removal men said, ‘What have you done?’” says Johan. The house was in a dire state with wires dangling from ceilings, decades of filth and generations of mice. They lived in it for a year before beginning renovation work. Then, inspired by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Johan set about introducing light into the split-level house. A new concrete extension, cast in-situ and with thermal insulation, was built on the ground floor. The garage was reclaimed and converted into a spare room the generous 1970s storage space was opened up, adding height to the space, and internal windows were introduced so light could flow from both sides of the house. Plasterboarded narrow walls which created a dark hall were removed, expanding the entire ground floor, and the sloped roof of the extension was planted with wildflowers to guide the eye from the sitting room on the first floor out across the green roof, into the garden and trees beyond.
The lighting, like the furniture, is design-led, chosen to elevate spaces unobtrusively, like the grey Le Corbusier spotlight positioned next to a Marcel Breuer Wassily armchair.
The satisfying geometric shape of every step on the staircase is revealed rather like an elegant MC Escher interior study and shared through an internal glass window in the stairwell and in the wall. This constant unmasking, using glass to connect to the building’s framework, admitting sunlight from every direction, bathes the entire space.
“I like the idea of a united feeling, that if a person is in one part of the house and someone else is in another they both have a visual connection from the internal windows, a discernible awareness of sensing everything all at once.”
The third floor is laid with black gym rubber, a modest material that eliminates noise and is soft underfoot. In the two bedrooms, huge chunks of loft space were removed, unearthing the handsome original timber framework, which they kept exposed, the extra space adding stature to the rooms and providing a feeling of expansiveness.
Choosing bold forms and materials that reflect the original fabric of the building, Johan and Anita have futureproofed their home for modern family life, utilising design flair from European modernism.
“In Denmark, there is not the mix of culture there is here,” explains Johan. “You have to conform. I got bored and wanted change, but I appreciate that some things they get right, like the idea that if you can afford it, spend money on good quality and design and it will outlive you.”