How to build a dream home from scratch

Architect Will Burges thought he ought to get on with his self-build ambition now his genius family home in Crystal Palace has been named as Riba London Small Project of the Year. He tells Cat Olley how it came together

M ost of us are susceptible to curious compulsions as we age. Some run marathons, climb mountains or enroll in gruelling physical feats of another flavour. Others write the big novel. But if you're an architect? It's all about the self-build.

In 2015 Will Burges was residing quite happily in a Sixties house on the Dulwich Estate with his wife, Sam, a studio manager, and their two young children. He suspects his 31/44 Architects co-founder Stephen Davies, by then a self-build veteran, had something to do with the siren call. "I thought, 'Oh, God, he's doing his third one, I should at least have a go.

But I wasn't really thinking that it would come off." Both were well versed in the acquisition of scrappy oddments of land, from old garages to side returns. Davies had turned the pursuit of these pockets into an art form, tracking the hundreds of hopeful letters he'd directed to London letterboxes in a dizzying spreadsheet.

Several years earlier Burges had clocked a Fifties house in nearby Crystal Palace with a particularly generous side garden. "I plucked up the courage to write this one letter and amazingly, they replied and said they'd consider it," he says. This was 2015, and the owners of said letterbox had grown restless after several requests to build an sizable extension on their wraparound corner plot had been denied.

Conversations continued for a couple of years as Burges drew up plans for an ambitious family home that would draw on decades of practice, on travel memories, on buildings he'd known and loved.

He secured consent before buying the plot, in a chicken-and-egg style deal that relied upon the neighbours upping sticks.