Second Home Holland Park

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

SECOND HOME HOLLAND PARK

Selgascano

ARCHITECTS
Selgascano

A LEAD ARCHITECTS
José Selgas, Lucía Cano

VIDEO
Taller Cejuela

CLIENT
Second Home LTD

STRUCTURE
Structure Workshop

BUILDER
Heydon and Carr

DESIGN TEAM
Paolo Tringali, Juan Jose Muñoz, Inés Olavarrieta, Giulia Cosentino, Amelia Somoza, Ricardo Mancho

PHOTOGRAPHS
Iwan Baan

AREA
11280 ft²

YEAR
2017

LOCATION
United Kingdom

CATEGORY
Cowork Interiors

Everything in this building is about scale.
It is small but with a strong personality, like in a circus; every act is as important as the other, no hierarchies, and only working all together do they create something unique.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

Scale due to the dimensions of the site. It is made up of five existing buildings which all together are only 800 sqm, and all of them different in periods and shapes.

Scale due to the amount of history in the place. Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie, was filmed here.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

It was filmed in the studio of Vogue photographer John Cowan, and the actor David Hemmings was working in the spaces which you can still recognise in the movie.

A few years after that, Richard Rogers had his studio here, his very first personal studio, after winning the competition for the Pompidou Centre.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

Stairs, skylights, a bridge and a vine that Richard Rogers himself planted in the courtyard are bits of his design added to the history of the buildings that we kept as a treasure of modern archaeology.

The rest was easy. We needed to expand the existing mezzanine and we opened some more skylights to give more natural light to the people and to the 18 real trees that are now adding more natural history to the place.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

We also needed to find a way to cover a large part of the courtyard, whilst keeping the vine alive.

We used a clear double layer roof, and to insulate it we worked with environmental engineer Adam Ritchie, filling the gap between the layers with soap bubbles. It takes 20 minutes to fill and the effect can last a whole day.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan

Richard Rogers’ vine is still very much alive and covering the whole roof in addition to the bubbles.

Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan
Second Home Holland Park
© Iwan Baan


Second Home Holland Park
Plan - Ground floor
Second Home Holland Park
Plan - First floor
Second Home Holland Park
Plan - Site
Second Home Holland Park
Sections