Hackney Backhouse is a brave, imaginative and contemporary back-garden house that volunteers itself to the street through louvered screens of weathering steel, affording fleeting glimpses into the house to passers-by. The two-story, three-bedroom family home is neatly tucked onto an 11m by 8m site in a Hackney Conservation Area, formerly occupied by a run-down garage and workshop. Keen to avoid divorcing the house from its context and its neighborhood, Guttfield Architecture designed a house with a direct visual relationship with the street – the house is part of the street and the street part of the house. A screen of vertical corten louvers between the house and the street is intended as a simple device to moderate this two-way relationship, firstly by actively engaging the street and secondly, by bringing the street into the house, all while retaining privacy where needed.
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