2a Drax Avenue, Wimbledon

2a Drax Avenue, Wimbledon

This is a detached house of Grade II listed status, built using concrete beams and floors with high-quality Forticrete blockwork arranged in a series of horizontal and vertical planes. The design was much influenced by Colin St John Wilson's Cambridge houses, particularly Cornford House. Windows are double-glazed units in pine or aluminium frames, or set directly into the wall. Applied finishes are avoided both inside and out, with the aesthetic and scale of the house defined by the ratio of the blockwork.

The house fills the width of a sloping site, with its entrance on the west side. The plan is L-shaped across three levels and is organised with separate adults' and originally children's areas, plus a common living zone. A spacious split-level living and dining room opens onto the garden on both east and west sides, with an alternative entrance providing access to the street from the west. The dining area connects to the kitchen and to the children's wing, which comprises a play and study area and two bedrooms (formerly three), projecting over the lower-ground floor carport and recessed street-level entrance. The study and master bedroom, which give onto an extensive roof terrace, are located on the first floor.

The street frontage on the west immediately establishes privacy, with the recessed entrance and living room separated from the street by a raised front garden. Glazed walls of the living room and children's play area and sitting room mean the front garden functions as a court, while the upper storey steps back. The garden frontage on the east is more open, with substantial glazing on the ground floor and the pre-cast concrete post and beam structure expressed externally. On the left side, a more solid, higher block containing the kitchen and study projects into the garden. Originally, all moving windows and doors were single-glazed, due to doubts at the time of construction about the integrity of seals in double-glazed moving elements. All doors and windows have now been replaced with double glazing except for the large sliding door in the living room.

Interior boundaries between inside and outside are blurred through the arrangement of exterior walls and use of glazing. Living areas have formal dignity echoing the external architecture. A richly finished entrance stair provides a sense of arrival, and the living and dining room has large scale and monumental quality. The interiors feature wooden floors and fitted furniture that soften and warm the space.

Fair-faced Forticrete blockwork walls contrast with plaster or white-painted concrete plank ceilings, alongside Columbian pine fixtures and fittings, beech stairs and floors in the living areas, cork floors in the kitchen, and carpeted floors in the bedrooms and study. The stairs, open-sided at the bottom, rise between fair-faced Forticrete block walls to the living room at upper level. The split-level living and dining room is the principal space, lit by full-height glazing. The upper storey feels removed from the main body of the house and is reached by a narrow stair that opens onto a top-lit study area. A glazed corridor adjacent to the terrace leads to the main bedroom and bathroom. Columbian pine flush-panel doors, panelling and original fitted furniture remain throughout, notably in units dividing kitchen, dining and living areas, in the master bedroom and in cupboards and doors lining the entrance hall. Within the secondary wing, flush-panel doors are painted white and walls are lined in natural hessian. The upper floor bathroom is white-tiled with white fittings as originally built; the lower floor bathroom has been refitted as a wet room.

The concrete blockwork street boundary wall is integral to the house.