White House is home to an art collector and acts as part gallery, part home, with a key connection to the surrounding landscape spaces, forming a balanced approach. K.P.D.O. emphasises a focus on refined elements, creating a curated hierarchy between insertions to craft a home of unexpected luxury and familiar comfort.

As a careful re-sculpting of an existing 1980s Georgian revival home, White House was stripped back to a core of rudimentary elements, where planning was revised and opened up. Both in connecting to how a modern home functions and how each room is occupied, the new arrangement ensures an open flow of movement throughout, with a focus on elevated and convening spaces for socialising. While at its heart White House is a home, it is also a place intended for gathering, with entertaining a key element of the brief. K.P.D.O. carefully proposes a home that allows for the intimate and for an expanded gathering of many, all crisply brought together through a cohesive vision.

Built by COMB Construction together with landscaping by Tract Consultants, White House is filled with natural light, with glazed openings and light-toned drapery encouraging sunlight to illuminate the interior. Whilst the existing home combined a generosity of proportion and internal volume, there was a need for a consistent approach throughout, one that focused on crafted and carefully considered detailing and junctions – this became a guiding principle for the new gestures. Forming a base of clean lines and warm and textural timber underfoot, the sweeping staircase connects the levels, encouraging the eye upward.

Warm white walls encase the home, akin to a gallery space, allowing the focus to be drawn to the curated collections as an extension of the owners themselves. Furniture and lighting then act as their own sculptural additions to the structure, drawing on a shared and saturated palette of sumptuous and richly textured fabrics as interactive elements within. Ensuring an ingrained sense of flexibility – in the planning and how each space connected and opened to the next – was key. Together, the transition between inside and out, and the potential for spill over into the surrounding garden spaces, became an integral component of the new works.