All Spruced Up

London practice Ao-ft's debut project is a carefully crafted timber house that perfectly slots into its urban landscape

- By Ellie Stathaki

If Ao-ft co-founders Liz Tatarintseva and Zach Fluker describe parts of their new house as a Swiss army knife, they’ve got a point. The home’s extremely high standard for functionality and efficiency truly belies its small but perfectly formed physique. Spruce House and Studio – the name makes sense as soon as you set eyes on its timber-clad façade – is the pair’s joint home in east London’s Walthamstow. Not only has it been a personal labour of love, it’s also the first flagship project of their newly minted architecture practice.

Not too long ago, Tatarintseva and Fluker were living in another part of east London and working in separate places – the former as a practitioner at Gianni Botsford Architects, and the latter as a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The pair met at the Architectural Association in the late noughties (Tatarintseva enrolled after school and Fluker joined after completing a degree in industrial design in his native Canada) and have been together ever since. They had been looking for a project – a plot or space to transform into their own domestic haven – when Tatarintseva stumbled upon a rundown structure on a historic commercial street in the Orford Road conservation area in 2017.