Introduction

by Dominic Lutyens

This issue explores a home’s potential to grow in myriad ways.

For most of us a home isn’t a static environment but evolves over time to suit changing circumstances.

Hunters Moon

Young children’s rooms are adapted as teenagers’ domains, while an elegant, ground-floor bathroom can also be a practical space to give a newly acquired, muddy-pawed dog a jolly good hose-down. This issue, Spaces for Growing, explores how PAD has matured in the past quarter-decade, and how its architecture and clients’ needs have changed too.

A contemporary home needs to be flexible and multifunctional. A studio in the garden not only provides a house with an extra room but can prove an indispensable space for ever-changing creative activities.
Cross street

A new skylight at the top of a stairwell draws in more daylight and natural ventilation. Technology can allow a home’s atmosphere to morph imperceptibly, from moodily lit spaces for intimate sit-down dinners to different zones for entertaining, thanks to speakers discreetly secreted throughout the house.

Increasingly clients ask for such interventions to be carried out in phases, perhaps pacing themselves as budgets allow. And they might request features and facilities that anticipate future needs – informal partitions to divide up a space, a shower area for washing a household’s beloved new pet or neat recesses above windows for hanging blinds whenever required.

Englefield House, 2014

Today’s homes are multifaceted – open to all kinds of possibilities when it comes to both house and garden, and adaptable to changing lifestyles. Our homes grow as spaces and canvases for experimentation, learning, ageing, relaxing and more; as we grow, so the spaces around us change.

Spaces for Growing