Modern idyll.

This new house in north London is an inventive synthesis of urban domesticity.

The leafy Victorian terraces of Dartmouth Park, in north London, are notoriously resistant to interlopers. With its honey-coloured brick and curving, steel sheet roof, this new house, designed by Justin De Syllas and engineered by Dewhurst Macfarlane, has the decided air of an interloper. Yet, like the solid brick and stucco villas that surround it, the house is an elegant synthesis of urban domesticity. The approximately square site lies on the south side of Dartmouth Park Road. The new two-storey house is now the first building in the street, positioned lengthways along the north edge of the site. This tactic generates a formal street presence and encloses a garden to the rear. The plan reinforces the notion of turning in on a private realm and establishes a hierarchy of served and servant spaces. The latter are located along the street side serving the main rooms that connect through to the garden.

The ground floor is divided into two levels. The eastern end of the ground floor is maintained at street level, creating a sequence of spaces that leads directly from the entrance hall through glazed doors into the kitchen, which has a large bay window to accommodate a dining table on the garden side. A paved patio garden forms an outdoor extension to the interior. At the west end of the plan, the slightly raised level contains the guest bedroom and bathroom on the street side and the main bedroom and study on the garden side. Raising the floor level by three steps separates the bedroom area from the rest of the house and gives the guest room and bathroom an increased degree of privacy from the street.

The cloistered intimacy of the bedroom and study quarters is counterpointed by the airy vault of the living room above. Poised on the first floor to exploit views and light, the open-plan living space is a fluid, modern piano nobile, drenched in daylight. A terrace overlooking the garden extends along the south elevation, connecting and extending the inside with the outside. A purpose-designed stair, with lozenge-shaped treads of solid maple set in a prefabricated mild steel frame, leads down through a double-height space to the kitchen below.

A wall of intoxicating pinkness rises up from the kitchen and snakes lengthways into the living room. En route, it encloses a curvaceous window seat with northward views up to Highgate Hill. The intensity of the pink is matched by a equally vibrant yellow tower that encloses the fridge freezer in the kitchen.

Detailing is kept admirably crisp and simple, with selected factory or workshop-made components and fittings used to complete the basic design. All walls and ceilings are finished in painted plaster, with no skirtings on the ground floor and flush skirtings on the first floor. The ground floor is paved throughout with pre-cast concrete garden paving slabs in slate grey with a stone dressing finish. The living room floor is maple veneered MDF floorboards, chosen for their thermal stability over underfloor heating.

Although not state of the art in terms of energy-conscious design, the house is endowed with a number of energy-saving features, notably a high thermal mass, extensive south-facing glazing and a whole house ventilation system with heat recovery. Heating is by means of warm-water heating coils buried in the floor screed and served by a condensing boiler. This system is controlled by a computer that measures the heat loss of the building fabric and programmes itself to respond to changes in the external air temperature before these affect internal temperatures, which helps to compensate for the slow response time of the underfloor heating. The house's environmental performance has proved more efficient than many more explicitly revolutionary house designs, which sacrifice performance in use to notions of constructional and aesthetic innovation.