Greenview House turns a plot that shrank to just 33 square meters (355 square feet) after the walls went up into a family home with a 97A energy rating. Designed by Paper House Project, a London-based architecture practice, for its own director James Davies, the self-build occupies the abandoned footprint of a garage on a tight urban backland site in Stoke Newington with no direct access. The numbers make the case that even an almost unbuildable pocket of land can support one of the city’s highest-performing homes.
A long-forgotten garage provided the only available footprint for the project, with Greenview House standing mid-terrace in a row of three mews houses next to Butterfield Green — a compact typology explored elsewhere in a similar street pattern at Canon Mews in Edinburgh. Davies designed the house for himself, his partner Sophie, and their whippet Dylan, working through the site’s tight geometry and lack of direct access. “I have an iterative approach to working and enjoy problem solving,” Davies said, describing how the plot’s original 40 square meters (431 square feet) shrank to 33 square meters (355 square feet) once the wall build-ups were accounted for.
A hardworking small-space design had to justify every element’s place on such a constrained site, according to Davies. “In small spaces, every aspect of the design has to work hard and either do one thing really well, or multiple things at the same time to justify its inclusion,” he said. That logic runs through the house’s interconnected, double-height spaces, where light wells at the front and rear pull daylight deep into the plan and create sightlines across floors.
A front light well does more than bring in light, providing what the practice describes as defensible space between the main living area and the shared access route the house otherwise lacks. A 3-meter (10-foot) living green wall brings vegetation into the ground-floor dining space, while the first floor holds a discreet outdoor terrace and a large-format picture window framing the park beyond.
A blackened timber facade lets Greenview House hover above the boundary wall, retreating into the tree line — more treehouse than townhouse, according to the practice. The modest entrance conceals a 2-bedroom home built with oak carpentry throughout, where galvanized steel and polished concrete add a utilitarian edge against the warmth of the timber.
Concrete forms a continuous floor finish through the basement’s two bedrooms and shower room, a material choice Davies frames as functional rather than decorative. “Concrete is a very tactile, dependable material,” he said, adding that using it as a single floor finish “makes the space feel bigger but also creates a very physical connection to the house when you enter.”
Cross-laminated timber became the project’s structural backbone, prioritized for practicality over aesthetics — a similar reliance on timber runs through the retrofit at Canonbury House elsewhere in London. Prefabricated CLT panels were craned into place, leaving the structure sound in under a week and reducing the energy demands of the build itself, while also acting as an acoustic buffer against city noise.
A fabric-first approach pushed insulation and airtightness levels beyond current UK standards, combined with triple-glazed windows, solar panels, an air-source heat pump, and an MVHR ventilation system. The result is an EPC rating of 97A, annual carbon emissions of just 0.1 tonnes of CO2, and primary energy use of 5 kWh per square meter. “During the summer, the house averages approximately 2 days per week of ‘free’ electricity,” Davies said, noting that windows can stay closed while the MVHR system keeps a constant supply of fresh air.
Bedrooms sit at basement level, cocooned from street noise, while the living spaces upstairs stay in constant relation to the outdoors through the picture window, terrace, and living wall. Somewhere in that sequence, the same 3-meter living wall that pulls greenery into the dining space has also become the closest thing to a garden that Sophie and James’s whippet, Dylan, gets to walk past every day.
Greenview House by Paper House Project | Location: Milton Grove, London — Year: 2026 — Key materials: cross-laminated timber (CLT), blackened timber cladding, oak carpentry, galvanised steel, polished concrete