Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cWe wanted to create an enfilade and I should use that word sparingly for want of sounding pretentious, but it\u2019s like creating streams so you get the width, depth and full use of the spaces,\u201d smiles architect John McAslan describing the masterplan behind the renovation of his Victorian home in south-west London. \u201cIt really is a pull of energy, to move you through from the front door to the garden,\u201d adds his wife, Dava, dressed in vibrant Issey Miyake Pleats Please.The journey \u2013 or enfilade \u2013 through the McAslan home, situated on a leafy, residential street, begins at a\u00a0knee-height bespoke wooden gate. This unusual design is the initial welcome into the expansive, expressive interior that lies beyond the front door.\u00a0The hallway, with original geometric period tiling, features an oblique, narrow glass window that frames an olive tree planted in an external side return. On\u00a0the left, it bursts open into a living area, and straight\u00a0ahead segues into a big kitchen that swings out perpendicularly into a\u00a0dining area with a vast Vitra table.\u00a0A wall of sliding glass garden doors filters light across the\u00a0entire ground floor.Scotsman McAslan, who founded John McAslan+ Partners in 1993, is a pioneer of intervention and preservation \u2013 an architectural approach that favours repurposing (rather than demolishing) old buildings. His multi-award-winning practice is behind some of the most impressive transport hubs in the world including King\u2019s Cross Station, Sydney Metro\u2019s Central Station, the upgrade of Penn Station in New York and Bond Street station on the \u00a0Elizabeth Line, alongside residential towers, education centres and museums such as the revamped The Burrell Collection in his home city of Glasgow. While different, each project is underpinned by human-centric architecture that improves the quality of urban life.When it came to conceiving this house, the McAslans were not interested in statement-making grandeur but in\u00a0creating a beautiful environment in which to live, love,\u00a0think and\u00a0work. For John, the methodology is the same. \u201cIt\u00a0was about transforming the old into new, which\u00a0is what a lot of the work of the practice is about. We\u00a0wanted\u00a0to open it up, retain what we could, set a budget\u00a0and develop a language of architecture and design\u00a0that was an expression of us,\u201d he says. \u201cThe central\u00a0idea\u00a0here was to get the energy of the house circulating front to back and retain, remodel and upcycle\u00a0what existed to varying degrees \u2013 we had an ecological, fabric-first approach.\u201d \u00a0Since the early 1980s, the couple lived in four different properties in Notting Hill. As John was building his business, his wife Dava Sagenkahn was working in recruitment while raising three children, Hannah, Flossy and Renwick, who have now all left home. There was no\u00a0urgency to move, rather a gentle yearning for more light,\u00a0sky and a sense of expansiveness, which is hard to find\u00a0in\u00a0the densely occupied city. \u00a0Moving south of the river was not on the agenda until their daughter Hannah, a lawyer who lives in the area, spotted the property and went for a recce, iPhone in hand. She sent the video to John and Dava who were on holiday at\u00a0their restored farm south of Florence. They swiftly put\u00a0in\u00a0an offer. \u201cWe\u2019ve never done that before. We\u2019re normally forensic,\u201d laughs Dava of the almost blind bid and\u00a0the serendipitous events that landed them the keys.\u00a0The core renovation with the construction company Davies & Daughters involved knocking down walls, opening up all the spaces, building out into the garden and ripping out a \u201ccircus tent\u201d conservatory. \u201cIt was an awful octagonal makeshift \u201970s one \u2013 boiling in the summer and leaky in the rain,\u201d says John, rolling his intense blue eyes. It was reconfigured into a punched-out\u00a0space that now frames a small kidney-shaped garden\u00a0landscaped by Jack Newlyn and enclaved by bamboo and neighbouring trees.\u00a0The first floor hosts John and Dava\u2019s bedroom, a private sitting room and an emerald-Bisazza-tiled en suite bathroom with a curvilinear wall. The top floor houses two super-size flexible sleep-living spaces for guests and family, with extended eaves that create new volumes and\u00a0light. The upstairs bathrooms are vivid lime green \u201ccubes\u201d with a painted floor, ceiling and wall in the same wake-me-up hue. \u201cThe layout of the house is clear and direct, with flexibility: the ground floor is entirely open, engaging the hall, reception spaces, extended kitchen, garden room and fully opening into and through the garden,\u201d says John, who admits he has an aversion to rooms with closed doors. \u201cThe first floor is our apartment, and the top floor is a suite of connected spaces that can open or close as needs be.\u201d \u201cI feel I can use every room,\u201d says Dava. \u201cThere are times when I take my laptop and go all the way up to the top of the house and it\u2019s just great.\u201d\u00a0There were a few trouble spots, including a damp, rotting cellar that required gutting and fixing to make way for a utility area. \u201cHow we avoided electrocution, I don\u2019t know!\u201d says Dava of the early renovation. They moved in permanently in March 2024. Perhaps unusually, the couple were aligned on pretty much all aspects, including the wood-panelled walls and simple single strips of shelving (by John Cherrington of Windmill Furniture) that feature throughout. The Strong White (Farrow & Ball) wall paint changes with the light, accented by breezy voile curtains, citrus-green blinds (that beam optimism from the street view) and the wide oak floorboards. \u00a0The couple first met in the late 1970s in Boston at the canteen of the architectural practice Cambridge Seven Associates, where John had just landed an internship as a\u00a0recent graduate from Edinburgh University. Dava was working as an executive assistant to one of the partners. It was a coup de foudre. \u201cI\u00a0said to myself, well, I\u2019m going to marry her. This was she! So I stayed my year and I think on the last day I asked you out or something,\u201d smiles John, who returned to London to work at Richard Rogers and rack up a phone bill calling his sweetheart. A transatlantic courtship ensued before Dava moved to the UK in 1981 and they wed. \u201cNot really knowing each other, but enough to know,\u201d laughs Dava. \u201cThis was not anything I ever planned when I was burning my bra with my feminist sisters: a, to get married; or b, to marry someone I didn\u2019t know very well.\u201dThe couple share a love of adventure, travel, family and collecting that is writ large in their collection of furniture, art and artefacts. The cane and teak furniture is a combination of original armchairs designed by Pierre Jeanneret for Chandigarh in the 1950s, with a number of pieces recently made by Phillips Antiques in India in reclaimed teak. The wooden screens by Artek were designed by Alvar Aalto in 1936, and they own a standout Brazilian petal table by Jorge Zalszupin from the 1960s. \u201cWe dressed the interiors with an array of panelled wall assemblies \u2013 some open and some closed \u2013 for our library. The artefacts, collected over time and very personal to us, express our journey individually and as a family,\u201d says Dava.There is a luminescent collection of Bakelite pieces (many found in Martha\u2019s Vineyard) perched on cabinets; a\u00a0vintage Missoni rug alongside colourful abstract floor coverings, some sketched by John and handwoven by Shyam Ahuja in Mumbai. The artworks, casually leaning on the narrow shelves and coursing up the stairwells, range from an exquisite sketch of two female bottoms by\u00a0their daughter Flossy (John swears it is better than Klimt) to contemporary Indian abstract painters, and a\u00a0very early American 1869 Shield, Eagle and Flags stamp\u00a0(one of a series purchased for their children) to\u00a0celebrate Dava\u2019s US roots.By contrast, there are photographic works by the Indian artist Raghu Rai, alongside Wolfgang Tillmans and Simon Starling. The couple are patrons of emerging artists and the collection is diverse, esoteric and autobiographical \u2013 with many humorous anecdotes attached. \u201cWe began collecting around 40 years ago when we first married, starting with Peter Blake\u2019s pencil studies of a lady\u2019s bottom made in 1955\u00a0when he was a student at the RCA. From there we focused on European expressionists like Paul Klee, Jean Metzinger, Erich Mendelsohn, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay and Giorgio Morandi,\u201d says John. They also share a love of abstract Indian painters including Ram\u00a0Kumar, Tyeb Mehta and Francis Newton Souza \u2013 a founding member of the Progressive Artists\u2019 Group.The duo are strong believers in community and in preservation. In 2010, they fundraised \u00a33.5mn with the local community in Argyll to save Dunoon Burgh Hall, an\u00a01874 arts venue in the seaside town of Dunoon, where\u00a0John grew up. The building was in danger of being\u00a0torn down, so they bought it for \u00a31. It is now a thriving cultural hub and there are plans to establish a library and archive centre with their vast collection (around 2,500) of architectural and art books. McAslan is also lobbying the GLA and central government as part of a Social and Affordable Housing Initiative calling for the adaptive reuse of redundant \u201cgrey belt\u201d office space (estimated at 24mn sq ft) as a sustainable alternative to the push for new-build homes. \u00a0One of the biggest eye-openers for John is the newfound joy of crossing the Thames en route to work. \u201cI\u00a0think of the Kinks and \u2018Waterloo Sunset\u2019, romantic meetings and all that stuff. But the big change is having that distance between work and home,\u201d he says. Not to mention the novelty of using the Overground and Underground. \u201cWhen he first got on the train, we thought he might not come back!\u201d says Dava. But now both have\u00a0the pleasure of coming home through an elegant front gate. Four neighbours have already inquired after its provenance. \u201cIt is our gate!\u201d they laugh in unison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cWe wanted to create an enfilade and I should use that word sparingly for want of sounding pretentious, but it\u2019s like creating streams so you get the width, depth and full use of the spaces,\u201d smiles architect John McAslan describing the masterplan behind the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":179762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-179761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179763,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179761\/revisions\/179763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}