Imagine a family home that sparks no end of ideas

Project Insight

Our founder Ted Cullinan and his wife Roz’s family home in Camden Mews was the fifth house Ted had designed and then constructed with his own hands. Built at weekends with help from family and friends, it is an architectural manifesto that has brought delight and inspiration to so many visitors and was rightly listed Grade II* in 2007.

Project Idea

The house is an upside-down, passive-solar house turned through 90 degrees to face south, built against the party wall. Ted drew the house in lectures all over the world as a logical construction sequence. In a double spread in the 1984 RIBA Publication Edward Cullinan Architects 8 drawings show the process below the classic black and white photograph with the children Emma, Kate and Tom and the completed section with Jim Stirling walking up the outside stair around the garage to the upper front door. A letter box let into the brick base allows the Sunday paper to be dropped directly into the adults’ bedroom.

Project Design

Ted set himself the challenge of building within the Parker Morris space standard but rearranged it so the ground floor brick base contains small monastic bedrooms while the single space upstairs could be more generous; glazed on three sides the open kitchen and stair were at the heart with the round dining table at one side and the sitting area at the other.

The house is a rich manifesto, full of ideas to be developed in later projects. Air-tight it was not, as the hanging windows slid open but with the south overhang and slatted timber blinds to east and west, it worked brilliantly.

Later the garage became a music studio and the flat roof became a nursery with cold frames for growing vegetable seedlings before taking them to Gib Tor in North Staffordshire.

This architecturally inventive self-built house allowed family life to flourish and many conversations to flow over mountains of home grown veg and copious Beaujolais Villages.