The House That Needed Turning Upside Down.
Some houses tell you exactly what’s wrong the moment you step through the door; others take a little time to reveal their story.
The terrace house I looked at this week — a tiny two-up two-down in Southsea — definitely belonged to the second group.
A small two-up two-down terrace:
narrow rooms, a downstairs bathroom, a kitchen barely wider than a corridor, and no garden at all — just a side passage leading to a shed. On the face of it, nothing unusual. Just another house shaped by the constraints of its era.
But design rarely begins with the problems.
It begins with noticing what works.
For this house, that moment arrived upstairs.
The first floor had a quality the ground floor simply didn’t:
light, openness, and a surprising glimpse across the rooftops to a distant spire.
Even though the rooms were small, they felt alive in a way the darker, more compromised downstairs didn’t.
And that’s when a different question surfaced:
What if the house is telling us where the living spaces want to be?
We’re so used to certain arrangements — living room downstairs, bedrooms above — that we rarely stop to ask whether they still make sense, especially in small homes.
But sometimes the building quietly suggests another logic.
In this case, the idea was simple:
Flip it.
Put the living, cooking, and eating spaces upstairs where the light is best.
Use the small flat roof as a terrace — a kind of elevated garden.
And let the ground floor become two compact but comfortable bedrooms with a bathroom in the middle.
Same footprint.
No extension.
No adding space — just rethinking it.
What I enjoy most about redesigning small houses is that they reward clarity over complexity.
There’s no room for unnecessary moves.
Every decision has to work hard.
And occasionally, a single idea unlocks everything.
Turning this house upside down felt like one of those moments — a reminder that design isn’t always about pushing outwards. Sometimes it’s about rearranging what’s already there so it can finally breathe.
It made me wonder how many small homes are like this: modest, overlooked, and full of possibilities hiding in plain sight.
And how often the simplest ideas are the ones that make them feel entirely new.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
Watch the video about this little terrace house
My friend Paul has designed an amazing (and massive) thing. And it has started to be built.
The secrets behind Liberty’s famous festive displays.
Another design video I made a few weeks back about a cottage in Devon.
Main Image credit: A new idea for a terrace house from above (ReRender from my drawing)
