In its original meaning, a ‘long gallery’ is defined as a narrow, elongated room with a high ceiling, typically found on the uppermost reception floor of country houses – notably in grand houses like Hardwick Hall, Astley Hall and Haddon Hall in the UK. These galleries usually ran along one side of the house, featuring generous windows that offered views on one side and doors leading to other rooms on the opposite side.
Long galleries served various functions, including spaces for entertaining guests, taking walks, socializing, and displaying art collections and family portraits. Although resembling spacious passageways, long galleries were intended to be used as distinct rooms rather than mere corridors.
This project drapes a light framework of dark green aluminium and glass along the perimeter of a house onto a generously wide north-east facing garden, maximising the path of the sun arcing from the back to the front with a clerestory window over the kitchen. The new addition is a modest version of a long gallery – an extruded room with a rich spatial character that links various spaces of the house with one long side open to the garden. At its outermost edges, the windows angle back to provide a more panoptic and expansive view than we typically expect with rear extensions of this type.
The construction of the new extension deploys readily accessible local industry and building trades (pressed metalwork and aluminium windows systems) which are refined to complement the language of thin steel framed windows, doors and conservatories of this house type – a red-brick 1930s Thomas Stringer-built semi-detached.
At the front of the house, the desire for tall south-facing windows is balanced with privacy requirements with a downward stepped section from the street and tall planting, set in planter beds of smooth-faced red brick with fine-lined white lime mortar in harmony with the original house.
