Row after row of Victorian town houses line Notting Hill, where architect Alex Michaelis and his family live. But the rhythm of repetitious Victoriana is broken at the Michaelises' address by a stone wall. Beyond it, there seems to be ... well, nothing.
Until you step inside the gate. To get around the neighborhood's conservative planning laws, which forbid anything modern from being visible from the street, Michaelis designed a curvy, contemporary house that's sunk into the ground.
The subterranean structure bucks convention in other ways, too. "Everyone in the family was involved in the design and got to say what he or she wanted," he explains. For Michaelis and his wife, Caro, a pediatrician, that meant a home with plenty of sleek white space. For the kids—Zac, 9; Kit, 7; and Ro, 5—it meant (what else?) a slide, a climbing wall, and a foosball table.
The architect's top priority, though, was making the home as ecologically sustainable as possible. "We're all aware of the dwindling supplies of energy," says Michaelis, who is half of the London architecture firm Michaelis Boyd, known for its modern (and increasingly green) commercial projects. "It's up to our generation to experiment," he says. To that end, he built a roof with solar panels to supply energy and a sedum lawn to retain heat. He also installed a geothermal pump, a deep pipe that draws natural heat from the earth—an expensive, tricky endeavor. "There have been plenty of glitches, but I really wanted to give it a go," he says.
In the rest of the house, Michaelis fulfilled his family's more playful requests, creating something like a minimalist fun house. On the top floor, the home's hub, the kids got their foosball table—but instead of being relegated to a game room, it's smack between the dining space and the TV area. "We're like any other family," he says. "We spend as much time together as we can." To foster that togetherness, he didn't erect walls between the living area, dining area, and kitchen.
The couple decorated sparingly, with just a few modern-design classics—a Saarinen Tulip table, an Eames lounge chair—and try to shrug it off when the pieces take a beating from Zac, Kit, and Ro. "Kids find the craziest places to play," says Michaelis—including the leather B&B Italia sofa, the sections of which are sometimes used for pillow fights.
Not that there aren't plenty of kids' diversions elsewhere, including the climbing wall outside and the slide that runs alongside the staircase. "We tend to have a lot of the kids' friends around—they're here perhaps more than at some of the other parents' homes," Michaelis says, adding that even grown-ups can't resist skipping the stairs. "We've been known after a big dinner party to use the slide."
On the lower level, the architect indulged his own fantasy: "I've always wanted an indoor pool." The rest of the floor includes a wet room—its giant pipe showers reminiscent of Paris's Pompidou Center—and all the bedrooms. The less-is-more aesthetic reigns downstairs, too, with bare limestone floors, white walls, and discreet built-in cupboards to hide clutter. The couple keep their bedroom especially spartan (a gray bed and little else), while the kids decorate their rooms with stuffed animals, toys, and taped-up drawings.
Even on this lower level, light comes in through windows that look out onto a courtyard and a skylight—creating, counterintuitively, a feeling of airiness even belowground. "I wouldn't change a thing," says Michaelis of the subterranean design. "Everything's perfect—though," he admits, "I would like to live in a tree house next."
