Film Edmund Cook
Photography Elliot Sheppard

For the third film in our series, Homing In, our co-founder, Matt Gibberd, follows a line of crumbs to the home of architect Laura Dewe Mathews. Known locally as the ‘gingerbread house,’ there is creativity in every detail of Laura’s home, which has been cleverly stitched into its site in east London.

As with each of the films in the series, we aim to show how adherence to five key design principles – space, light, materials, nature and decoration – allows you, in Matt’s words, “to live a better and more fulfilled life.” Here, we examine Laura’s key ingredients – the materials that make up the gingerbread house she shares with her family. As she describes it, architecture is a process of balance and elevation: “You need carbs,” she says. “You need spice, a textured element, and a moment of joy …”

On a sharply sunlit day we discover that joy in spoonfuls. The stars of Laura’s tight material cast are wood and galvanized steel. Nature provides the garnish, jostling for space in the courtyard garden around which the house is built. Wood steals the show: “We should use it wherever possible,” Laura asserts. “It’s a nourishing material. It gives us oxygen and shade … It’s one of the greatest assets we have.”

The materials are left exposed to age naturally. For Laura, this is part of the narrative of her home: “It’s about the stories materials can hold,” she says. “In a mass-produced age, objects with character and soul really jump out.”

Spice comes in the shape of playful architectural details, which are apparent from the pavement. Built around a brick car body workshop, the timber façade’s sill lines are just lower than the top of the brick wall. This is Laura’s favourite detail as it allows the windows to melt into the house, preserving the dialogue between the old site and her own design.

This playfulness was key to every design stage. Laura knew she wanted the house’s proportions to be as grand as possible, so she worked with the site to distort perspective, aligning the rooms in an enfilade structure where the proportions diminish as you step through the house, creating the illusion of even more space. (As Laura says, “corridors are good for nothing.”) Those moments of joy are also seen in doors of entirely different proportions placed perpendicular to each other, as if straight out of Alice in Wonderland. There is even a circular hole built into Laura’s bedroom for calling down to the kitchen for a morning cup of tea.

Watch the full film here and tell us what you think in the comments, before subscribing to our YouTube channel. And stay tuned for the next film in our series, featuring Yasuyo and Phil Harvey. Happy watching.