Notting Hill Project
Excerpt from text by Dominic Bradbury
‘Nicholas Boyarsky and Nicola Murphy of Boyarsky Murphy Architects have also
designed a series of eye-catching staircases. They converted a former church tower
by Sir Christopher Wren, and utilised seven imaginative, bespoke staircases to span
its nine levels. A tailor-made design was also key to the successful amalgamation of two
Notting Hill flats – at ground and lower-ground levels – into a unified home for film
producer Rebecca O’Brien, best known for her collaborations with Ken Loach. They
designed a new stairway using cherry-wood treads, a steel frame and stunning strips
of coloured glass in green, blue and red. The turn of the stairs sits within part of a
new conservatory that helps open up the maisonette to the glorious private and
communal gardens at the back of the building. Here, the design of the new stairs was
key to the project and part of a strategy to open up the living spaces, creating a
greater sense of connection between the two floors.
“I could have just made a hole in the floor and put in a standard staircase, which
might have been cheap and efficient,” says O’Brien. “But I thought: ‘I’m only going to
do this once, and I have been here for 20 years and would love to spend another 20
years here.’ So I wanted to find something that really worked, and find someone who
could do it in an original way. It is a great way to open up the place.”
Boyarsky has also created a striking staircase that winds its way up a five-storey
Victorian house in Hampstead. Here, he added a new level at the top of the house, as
well as a new basement swimming pool, for his client, who works in theatre. But he
found that the floor plan ofthe house was being compromised by a very ordinary
Victorian staircase, complete with landings, which stood to one side ofthe building.
Ripping out the old staircase liberated the layout of the main living spaces, which
look out across a view of Hampstead Heath. A new elliptical staircase, with a steel
frame, ash treads, a leather-clad handrail, along with a glass balustrade that can be
illuminated with coloured LED lights, now winds up a lift shaft at the front of the
house, looking out onto the street. The walls around the stairs are painted in
dramatic golden tones.
“It is a challenge how to connect space veltically and how you make a procession
through the building and tie things together,” says Boyarsky. “The new staircase gave
us the chance to do something sculptural and theatrical, while some of the paint
finishes around the staircase are inspired by theatre interiors.
“If you go back to Georgian houses, many of the staircases were made of cantilevered
stone, and attention was spent on staircases, especially that idea of rising up from the
entrance to the piano nobile and the drawing room above. We have lost some of the
ingenuity of the Georgian staircase, and it has taken time to understand how they
really worked.”‘
