Leverton House: Echlin’s Victorian restoration built around a green core

Interiors · London

Reading time: 8 min

Leverton House is usually described as a Georgian restoration. It isn’t: the terrace it sits in is Victorian, built in the 1860s. What Echlin actually did was more interesting than either label, a three-year restoration organised around a planted courtyard cut through the centre of the plan.

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Leverton House, Echlin’s five to six bedroom family home on Ossington Street in Notting Hill, is usually introduced as a restoration of a “Georgian inspired facade.” It is worth correcting before anything else, because it changes what the project actually is. Ossington Street sits inside the Pembridge conservation area, developed between 1858 and 1864 by the landowner Robert Hall and builders Francis and William Radford. The stucco fronted terraces there are Victorian, not Georgian, and the confusion is an easy one to make: mid-Victorian London builders leaned hard on Georgian classical proportions, white render and restrained detailing, which is exactly why the two periods get mixed up on stucco streets like this one.

Correcting the date does not diminish the project. If anything, it sharpens it: Echlin spent three years restoring a genuinely Victorian street facade in a conservation area while gutting and rebuilding the interior behind it into something resolutely contemporary, organised across five floors around a planted internal courtyard. This is Echlin working in a different register from their Rathbone Square penthouse, covered elsewhere on this site. Rathbone Square was a new-build show flat, zoned by colour and material for a buyer nobody had met. Leverton House is an existing conservation-area townhouse, rebuilt for an actual family, and it shows in how differently the studio approached it.

Leverton House’s green core: daylight and planting run through five floors

The organising idea at Leverton House is a “green core”, a planted internal courtyard cut through the centre of the plan, fitted with a living wall and floor to ceiling glazing that pulls daylight down through every level of the house. It is the kind of intervention that only works in a full strip-out restoration, because it requires reworking the building’s entire section rather than simply redecorating within existing walls, and it is the clearest sign that Echlin treated this less as a facade-preservation job and more as a wholesale reinvention of what a Victorian terrace plan could do.

A helical staircase, sinuous rather than straight-run, connects the five floors around that core, and the lower ground level, housing the kitchen, family room, games room and a multi-use therapy room, takes its cues directly from the courtyard: soft green hues, leaf and foliage motifs worked through print, shape and texture, and a Deirdre Dyson rug patterned with leaves that ties the family floor’s imagery back to the living wall above it. The basement below holds a gym, completing a five-level section that treats greenery as a genuine organising material rather than a decorative afterthought.

London terrace houses are notoriously difficult to light past their front and rear elevations, since a standard plan is long, narrow and blind down its middle, which is exactly the problem a genuine internal courtyard solves. Cutting one through a five-storey Victorian terrace means sacrificing usable floor area on every level to the void itself, a trade a lighter refurbishment would rarely make. That Echlin chose to make it anyway, on a conservation-area building where the street elevation could not be touched, says as much about the ambition of the brief as anything in the finished rooms: the only floor left to redesign freely was the one nobody from the street would ever see.

The formal rooms

The raised ground floor holds the formal drawing room, reached from the main entrance and kept deliberately separate from the family’s everyday floors below. It is built around a feature fireplace, with a woven leather lounge chair and a herringbone rug supplying texture, and a raised dining and entertaining level with a concealed bar that opens onto a south-west facing terrace overlooking the rear garden. A soft, natural colour scheme, green accents through upholstery and foliage, run through the room, lifted by pointed bursts of yellow in the artwork and the coffee table’s fabric, a considered pop against an otherwise quiet palette.

That rear garden runs to roughly fifty feet, a genuinely generous plot for a Notting Hill terrace, and the drawing room’s terrace was positioned specifically to look directly out over it, giving the formal floor its own outdoor register distinct from the courtyard below.

The drawing room’s role in the plan is worth being precise about. It sits directly above the family’s everyday floors but functions as their opposite: quiet where the lower ground level is busy, formal where the family room is deliberately loose, and given over entirely to entertaining rather than daily use. Echlin’s decision to keep that separation, rather than collapsing everything into one open-plan sequence as at Rathbone Square, is itself a reflection of the brief: a family home has to hold both registers at once, a private everyday life below and a room built specifically for guests above it, in a way a show flat designed to be viewed once in an afternoon never has to.

The kitchen and dining room

The dining room, adjoining the kitchen, is built around a single dining table crafted from large planks of natural wood, sized to seat eight comfortably. The kitchen itself pairs white marble worktops and full height marble splashbacks with flush, light wood cabinetry, a combination chosen to keep the room’s lines clean rather than busy. At the breakfast bar, reclaimed wooden stools handcrafted by Studio Haran bring the same material honesty into the room’s most used corner, a small, specific piece of craft attribution the original coverage of this project never made.

The choice to source reclaimed timber for stools rather than the table itself is a small but telling one. The table, the room’s largest and most visible object, is cut from new planks; the stools, tucked at the breakfast bar and touched daily rather than admired from across the room, are the reclaimed piece. It is the kind of hierarchy a design-and-build studio can afford to think through carefully, since Echlin was specifying every surface in the room rather than working within a client’s existing collection, and it is consistent with the wider pattern at Leverton House of putting the most considered material choices into the spaces the family would actually use, rather than the ones a viewing would pass through quickest.

The primary suite

The entire first floor is given over to the primary suite: bedroom, walk-in wardrobe, dressing room and bathroom. The palette continues the green thread established downstairs, layered here with gold, brown and red worked through cushions, artwork and fixtures. Plush light carpet runs through the bedroom and dressing area before giving way to smooth tile at the bathroom, where a freestanding roll-top bath finished in burnished iron sits as the room’s clear centrepiece.

The house was also given a bespoke scentscape, developed with the perfumer Rachel Vosper, layering a considered fragrance across the property in the same way the green core layers light and planting through it. It is an unusual level of sensory detail for a residential project, and one worth noting precisely because it rarely survives into published coverage of a house once the photography is done and the description turns back to materials and finishes. A scentscape only makes sense as a brief for a home someone actually intends to live in day to day, rather than a show flat viewed once and left; it is a small detail, but it is exactly the kind of decision that marks Leverton House out as a private commission rather than a marketing exercise.

Echlin’s two registers

Leverton House and Rathbone Square were built for entirely different audiences, and the studio’s approach shifted accordingly. A developer’s show flat has one job: persuade a buyer who has never met the studio, in the space of a single viewing, using a scheme bold enough to be remembered. A family’s own home has a longer, quieter job, one that has to survive years of actual use by people the studio worked with directly. Rathbone Square leans into spectacle, a Hubble-referencing rug and a metallic dining room built to be photographed. Leverton House leans into infrastructure, a courtyard cut through the building’s own section, a scentscape nobody visiting for twenty minutes would ever register. Both are recognisably Echlin, in the confidence of the material choices and the refusal to default to a single safe palette, but only one of them was built to be lived in.

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Final thoughts

Leverton House is a stronger project once its dates are corrected than it was as a vaguely “Georgian” restoration, because the real story is more specific: a genuinely Victorian conservation-area facade held in place while the interior behind it was entirely rebuilt around a planted courtyard that runs daylight and greenery through five floors. That is a harder brief than either a pure restoration or a pure new build, and it is where Echlin’s work here earns its place.