House of EM sinks an extension below grade in north London

May 18. House of EM filed plans for a terraced house in north London with a sunken rear extension that sits a meter below the original ground floor. The move keeps the garden visible from the main level and opens the lower room to three sides of glazing.

The studio is headed by Emma Bodie and Matthew Sanders, both formerly of Michaelis Boyd. The brief was a Victorian terrace with the usual problem: tight rear yard, no room to build up without killing the neighbor's light, no room to build out without losing the garden. The solution was to go down.

The extension drops into what was a half-level basement. New floor-to-ceiling glass wraps the rear and two flanks. A sliding panel on the garden side retracts completely, turning the room into what the studio calls a loggia. The term is borrowed from Italian courtyard vocabulary, an open-sided gallery that reads as neither indoors nor out. Here it means a kitchen and dining space that can be sealed in winter or opened flat to the yard in summer.

The floor is poured concrete with radiant heat embedded. The ceiling height is 2.7 meters, standard for a Victorian undercroft but generous once you sink the slab. The garden was replanted at the new grade with a stone terrace that continues the interior floor line. From the main floor above, the view reads as uninterrupted green, the glass below invisible unless you lean over the balustrade.

The palette is deliberate austerity: white-painted brick, blackened steel frames, pale oak joinery. No color, no pattern, no architect signature moves. The effect is a room that disappears when empty and scales to whatever happens inside it.

House of EM has worked this formula before, though not at this depth. The sunken plan solves the London terrace math without adding visible bulk. The loggia framing gives the trick a name and a precedent. The house reads quieter from the street than it did before the work started.