It's every architect's dream to own a plot of land in the centre of the city and design a home. Young architect Graham Bizley kept his eyes peeled for months for a site that through its position, tightness or planning complexity would prove too challenging for a developer, and in 1999, he found it: a 60m~2 site at the end of a Victorian terrace in north London, occupied by a single-storey lock-up that he subsequently knocked down. And that wasn't the only knockdown: at £36,000 in leafy Islington, it was the bargain of a lifetime. Bizley's initial scheme, which received planning permission, consisted of an experiment in Cor-Ten sitting atop a precast concrete plinth, pushing the boundaries of what he thought he could get away with. But a tight budget and a growing understanding of the context forced a change of heart. The dark Ibstock brick building that now occupies the site was economically a more realistic proposal and contextually more suitable.
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