For design and architecture obsessives, online independent estate agency The Modern House serves as a bible of sorts: an authority on contemporary living and a platform we can easily spend hours scrolling through as we drool over our dream homes. The agency specialises in design-led properties with an emphasis on natural light, airy spaces and truth to materials. Put simply: property porn. For your gawping pleasure, here are three contemporary homes on our radar at the moment, all currently available to buy through The Modern House.
Clerkenwell Cooperage
Built in the early 1900s and originally used as a brewery cooperage, Clerkenwell Cooperage is an exemplar of industrial design. Chris Dyson Architects were responsible for its renovation, which involved stripping the building back to its original features and masterfully combining new and old materials, including concrete, black steel and exposed brickwork. An extension created an expansive open-plan living area, above which rises a triple height atrium that serves to make a feature of a dramatic freestanding staircase. The rooftop terrace is the icing on the cake, offering a rare nature-filled haven in the middle of busy London.
King Henry's Road
This semi-detached Victorian townhouse in Primrose Hill is the work of architect Jamie Fobert. It's a spacious family home, arranged across four main levels with five bedrooms, three reception rooms and a sprawling back garden. The flow of open-plan space was integral to the design of the house, optimising it for entertaining and socialising: a dining area merges into a living space and kitchen and finally, a peaceful garden room. Making use of such materials as concrete, oak and steel, the house is light-filled, airy and modern.
Clayton Windmills
This seven-bedroom home in Clayton, West Sussex, combines a 19th century windmill and attached roundhouse, and a converted granary and 20th century mill house, all in the space of an acre and a half. A far cry from your standard country home, it's a bold, modernist take on the traditional Sussex mills, updated by architecture firm Featherstone Young, who introduced modern detailing and materials while paying homage to the agricultural past of the site. The house boasts a bespoke kitchen with a basalt worktop, a living room with oak-parquet flooring and a suspended log burner and a walled, open courtyard. Fancy a tree change anyone?
All imagery courtesy of The Modern House.
For more outstanding architecture, take a look at these impressive cliff-top houses.
