On the hunt for a fixer upper, Ian Turkington transformed a Victorian property in east London with a contemporary extension and sustainable upgrades

WORDS ALEXAN DRA PRATT 

The garden is long and narrow, so Ian cleared the outdoor space and designed a winding path to create a more dynamic perspective

PHOTOS WHITTAKER PARSON

East London might not seem like the best place for a landscape architect to create a garden paradise, but this small Victorian cottage gave Ian Turkington the chance he’d been waiting for. “I was fed up with living in flats and I wanted a house,” says Ian. “My son started looking in Walthamstow and I thought the area was lovely. There is a great selection of independent shops, good restaurants and a nice vibe. Then, this house came up. It’s in a terrace of four cottages on a lovely street with great architecture.”

Above all, the property has something that’s rare to find in London, a very large, 32m-long garden. Once Ian bought the property and moved in, he – unsurprisingly – immediately started work on the precious outdoor space. However, this wasn’t just due to Ian’s love of all things botanical. As the cottage is a terraced property, everything removed from the garden had to be taken out through the main house. So, it made practical sense for the outside space to be cleared first to remove all rubbish before restoring and extending the existing structure.

The original Victorian brick frontage was fully restored, with new double-glazed windows carefully aligned with the neighboring homes’

Despite being liveable, the cottage was in poor condition. Damp, rotten timbers and a series of small dark rooms made up the original building, which had been added to at some point with a couple of shed-like extensions to the rear. “It was horrible,” says Ian. “The garden was overgrown, and the previous owners hadn’t done a thing to it. But I was looking for a doer-upper and it was more manageable than a full self build project.”