Shop House

Number 9 sits at the closed end of Hawley Mews, a one-block cobblestone lane most people walk past without realising is there. The site stood empty for six decades after the original stable came down; the planning consent took eleven years; the build itself, two.

What McLaren Excell produced is uncompromising and quiet. The street façade is a single plane of board-formed concrete, broken only by a pivoting oak door eleven feet wide and a long horizontal slot for the entrance hall. Behind it, a double-height living volume opens onto a sunken courtyard cut into the floor plate, lit from above by a continuous skylight. The upper floor — three bedrooms — sits as a separate timber-clad box, expressed in section against the concrete shell.

The detailing is the kind that reads only in person: handmade brass ironmongery from Joseph Giles, a single 14-foot slab of Carrara travertine for the kitchen island, lime-plastered walls in a chalk-white that shifts colour through the day.