Street-Porter House
Street-Porter House, house in London that was designed by architect Piers Gough and completed in 1988. It is celebrated for its quirky details and postmodern design.
In the 1980s, Janet Street-Porter, a television producer who started out as a student at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, commissioned the house from Gough, a friend from her student days. Gough went on to become a founding partner of CZWG, a practice that brought Pop art sensibilities to architecture. Both the client and the architect of this house were interested in challenging conventional ideas of good taste and in making decoration an integral part of the design.
The house occupies a former bomb site and an entire street corner in the historic Clerkenwell district of London, between the financial center of the city in the east and the fashionable West End. The choice of what was a run-down location seemed eccentric at the time, but the area has since become one of the most fashionable parts of the city.
The four-story house uses colored bricks to give the impression of light and shade on the facade. Inside, the concrete floors are left bare and the walls are finished with pigmented plaster. The original upside-down plan had a guest bedroom on the ground floor, a master bedroom and bathroom on the middle floor, and a living room and kitchen on the top floor. The separate rooftop studio, with a high ceiling and huge triangular window, is accessed by an outside staircase. A spiky, steel lattice on the house’s exterior was added to discourage unwanted visitors and keep the abode from appearing too friendly.
The most exuberant features of the design, which plays on the form of the standard London row house, are the soaring, asymmetrical, blue-tiled roof and the interlocking diamond-shaped windows. The composition of Street-Porter House combines the joy of Art Deco with the kitschy, fun-loving hedonism that defined the 1980s. In 2018 the house was listed as a protected historic property by the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England.