Exbury House Lillington Gardens Estate With Attached Walls And Steps

Exbury House is a terrace of eight maisonettes built between 1969 and 1972 by the architects Darbourne and Darke for the City of Westminster. It forms part of the Lillington Gardens Estate.

The building is constructed of red brick walls with concrete slab floors that are exposed as painted bands, and a roof clad in asphalt or felt with chippings. The roof features a distinctive mansard finished in artificial slate with metal edges. The design uses a complex scissor plan arrangement, with maisonettes positioned to the east and west behind walled gardens. Units 1 to 4 have an extra kitchen-dining room set beneath the bedrooms of both ranges, with the living room located above. Units 5 to 8 are set behind with the living room and kitchen on ground level. Windows are aluminium sashes in black stained timber surrounds, with black doors, some of which are partly glazed. The garden walls form an integral part of the design and create the low centrepiece of this area of the estate.

John Darbourne won a competition in 1961 for the rebuilding of Lillington Street and formed a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to develop the scheme. The design took inspiration from the nearby Grade I listed Church of St James the Less, with its striking Victorian red brick, which the estate surrounds. The early phases of Lillington pioneered low-rise high-density solutions for public housing, with Darbourne rejecting the conventional symmetrical, free-standing block in favour of a more contextual approach where each resident would have a distinctive element with which to associate themselves. The scheme was successful and award-winning from the outset and was widely imitated.

For this third phase of Lillington, Darbourne and Darke revised their original designs to introduce more maisonettes for families with their own front door. In the revised scheme nearly half the units have a front door and small garden at ground level, and there is more private than public open space. Stylistically, the distinctive slate mansards were introduced here, a feature that would become characteristic of their later Marquess Estate at Islington. The revised plans achieved considerable family accommodation at a density of 255 persons per acre. The scheme spawned numerous imitations and won an RIBA Commendation in 1973.