Taper House
Hackney, London
Taper House is the complete refurbishment and extension of a Victorian terraced house in Hackney, London, by Merrett Houmøller Architects, finished in April 2023. The clients had travelled in Morocco and around the Mediterranean, and the plan borrows the riad: part of the first floor was removed to make a tall, skylit kitchen and dining room at the centre of the house with smaller rooms opening off it. Robert Houmøller: "Our brief was to create tall, light-filled spaces, with Moroccan riads being a big influence on the overall form," and on the old fabric: "At Taper House, we left the rough, exposed Victorian brick in the kitchen and all the inconsistencies of this on show." The interiors are by All & Nxthing, whose creative director Steve Nash describes the palette: "Natural earth-based materials such as the handmade brick floor, clay-plaster walls, band-sawn timber joinery and patinated copper were used," and the architects add exposed structural oak, wide oak boards, limewash, untreated copper, photovoltaic panels on the roof and, at the centre of the ground floor, a pond that harvests rainwater.
The card is a crop of the first photograph on the architects' own page for the house, by Helen Leech, taken from the kitchen end: the clay plastered walls taper up into piers around the double height, a skylight cuts in at the top left and a trapezium of high window at the right, the long table and its tan chairs sit under three pendants on the brick paver floor, the fluted maple island with its copper top and gas hob holds a bowl of fruit in the foreground, and the window seat at the left looks out through timber slats to the pond.
Merrett Houmøller Architects
Merrett Houmøller Architects is a small residential practice working between London and Stroud in Gloucestershire, co-founded in 2014 by Robert Houmøller and Peter Merrett, who studied together at Sheffield; Peter Merrett stepped back in 2022.
merretthoumoller.com · Instagram
All & Nxthing
All & Nxthing is a London interior design and interior architecture studio in De Beauvoir, established in 2015 by its creative director Stephen Nash; it publishes this house on its own site as The Med Terrace.
Architecture Merrett Houmøller Architects (@merretthoumollerarchitects). Interior design All & Nxthing (@allandnxthing). Photography Helen Leech (@laleechy). Landscape Rosebank Landscaping. Builder Solid Crew Construction. Seen via @aucoot.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.