Cast Corbel House / Grafted

Architects: Grafted
Area: 110 m²
Year: 2023
Photography: French + Tye
Structural Engineer: Banfield Wood
Main Contractor: Grafted
Landscape Design: Studio GB
Glazing: Festa System UK
Lighting Design: Ligne, Roset, Petite Friture, Heals, Marset, Nemo
Art / Curation: Mandell’s Gallery
Joinery: Grafted
Kitchens: Silestone, Mandarin stone
Flooring: Solid Wood Flooring Co.
Kitchen Flooring: Total Tiles
Dining Table: Matthew Hilton for Case
City: Norwich
Country: United Kingdom

Cast Corbel House, designed by Grafted in Norwich, UK, showcases an innovative rear extension that integrates geometric precast and brick façades. Completed in 2023, the project emphasizes material exploration, craftsmanship, and a functional layout tailored for hosting and improved work-life balance.

Situated in the Golden Triangle, a verdant suburban area of Norwich, Cast Corbel House has been redesigned by Norwich and East London-based architects, Grafted. The newly refurbished home features a rear extension with an updated geometric precast and brick façade, celebrating material exploration and craftsmanship. Grafted, launched in 2022, is a design and build firm realizing ambitious architecture while creating highly crafted designs.

A family approached Grafted to replace a poor-quality extension. The practice honed in-house fabrication skills to deliver the ambitious design within the project’s time and budget constraints. The brief aimed to reinvigorate an existing Victorian house for clients with frequent family visits. Grafted reorganized key living areas to provide light, functional spaces, making the home better suited for entertaining. Cast Corbel House features handmade, precast panels that wrap around the new extension, highlighting quality workmanship.

Previously, the five-bedroom detached house had a challenging ground floor plan with limited natural light and viewpoints. A minor renovation in the 90s resulted in poor accessibility and cold spaces due to uninformed material choices. Grafted aimed to rectify these issues and achieve a better work-life balance within the ground floor plan, resulting in a new layout of distinctly separate zones for office space, rest, and social areas.

Grafted utilized the expansive footprint with functionality in mind, accommodating the client’s growing extended family and their hosting needs. The hallway was reorganized to draw visitors through the home, encouraged by rear views to the garden. A logical, linear pathway replaced a previously obstructive utility room, with a neater laundry configuration now tucked behind handcrafted oak panels. Grafted maintained the original heritage tiles in the foyer and showcased their ability to deliver beautiful, tactile joinery in the kitchen.

Handcrafted cabinetry, chamfered edges, and a bespoke spice drawer offer personal detailing unavailable from off-the-shelf kitchen producers. The kitchen embodies natural materials to enhance the connection to the large rear garden and create a warm interior atmosphere, with richly stained oak surfaces and doors. The less-is-more approach to architecture prevails throughout the interior, reconnecting clients with their house’s finer qualities while embracing high-quality contemporary detailing.

The dining area, below a gently pitched, hipped roof and adjacent to a central column, distinguishes the kitchen and dining areas. The kitchen’s structure and orientation, with direct garden access, free up more active space for occupants. The new hand-upholstered double window seat, with added storage, addresses the room’s pre-existing thermal deficiency and connects to the rest of the kitchen through slender oak datum lines. Local business appreciation is evident in the curated selection of works from Norwich’s contemporary art gallery, Mandell’s, displayed in the kitchen and living areas.

Grafted’s care for material connection is embodied in the new studio’s style. The extension features a columnal pattern of red bricks, influenced by existing brick detailing. Corbelled precast masonry exemplifies Grafted’s craftsmanship, creating a dialogue between past and future through subtle material references.

Grafted’s fabrication process, a defining aspect of Cast Corbel House, involved cutting inverted molds into which red pigmented concrete was poured, using a motorized vibrating table to remove air bubbles for smooth precast panels. Collaborating with Banfield Wood on the façade support design, Grafted achieved an undulating wraparound pattern spanning 82 precast panels, many of which were unique. This controlled craft commitment reflects the practice ethos, foregrounding a dedication to detail.

The landscape concept design by Studio GB utilized Grafted’s skill to deliver hand-polished terrazzo coping stones, capping an existing circular pond. The first phase introduces a radial paving design and warm planting palette against a dense backdrop of mature trees and planting. As Grafted’s debut project, Cast Corbel House demonstrates a commitment to combining high-quality design with craftsmanship, empowering clients to achieve affordable, personal design at any scale.