Surman Weston crowns Peckham roof with verdant sun deck

‘I’ve always loved the feeling of a Moroccan riad – the intensity of the city below and havens on the roof,’ explains architect Percy Weston, standing on the rooftop of a house that he and Tom Surman, his co-founder at architecture studio Surman Weston, designed and built in Peckham, south London. This property has many enjoyable features, but the roof has a character of its own.

Here, a large three-dimensional cork-covered hatch slides open to reveal a space that is half greenhouse, half deck. At its edges are planting beds with flowering shrubs, budding birch trees and climbers that are already weaving in and out of the brickwork reveals.

The project is the first that Surman and Weston, friends since they were undergraduate students at Nottingham University, have built of their own volition. After buying the plot at auction in 2018, the pair were keen to showcase their talents as architects and builders. It is now home to Weston and his young family.

Thanks to the greenhouse – an off-the-shelf purchase that the pair customised with some minimal fixings – the roof provides valuable extra living space, and the cork hatch doubles up as a table. ‘The greenhouse can be 5-10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house,’ Weston says. ‘When it’s sunny but still cold outside, we like to have breakfast up here.’

For planting, the pair turned to garden designer Lidia D’Agostino, who collaborated on another of their buildings, the Hackney School of Food. ‘She didn’t have time to draw us a plan; she just appeared in a van with loads of plants!’ Weston recalls. Alliums and sunflowers were among the first flowers installed in the beds.

As with the rest of the house, the architects came up with some clever solutions to keep things budget-friendly. They made their own planting boxes by bending and riveting sheets of aluminium. The same material provides a simple water butt, hooked up to an irrigation system that keeps the beds well watered, surmanweston.com.