Geometric House — Full Architectural Services Somerset
This house in the rolling countryside below Somerset’s Quantock Hills was conceived as a place to take in the views near and far. Standing on a triangular site overlooking a pastural valley, our brief was also for a home with an industrial aesthetic, for making things, and for working from home.
Expressing these qualities without compromise was central to our design process: simultaneously working with a domestic scale and setting, whilst expressing robustness that speaks of how it has been constructed. A vocabulary of honestly expressed materials was used to unify the composition.
Externally this language is clear: A galvanised steel box with a saw-tooth roof overhangs a brick ground floor as if twisted by a giant’s hand. This sense of dynamism is not limited to the spatial qualities of the building. The house reveals itself, where others might be more subdued. Muscular details of the house’s steel frame are revealed in many rooms and external overhangs created by the rotating geometry are finished in timber, expressing the tensions between the two storeys.
The roof form is dictated by three arrays of solar panels that feed a battery system, that power a heat recovery unit and air source heat pump.
Inside, the double-height hallway leads to the ground floor spaces dominated by the kitchen-cum-living/dining room which overlooks the garden. Above, exposed metal lattice beams, interlaced with heat recovery pipes, fly across on an angle, perpendicular to the corrugations of the exposed first floor slab. These draw the eye to a vast window that reaches out to the horizon over the valley. Separately, and at the centre of the ground floor plan, a cosy snug awaits calmly, its rolling doors ready to create a quiet haven.
Ascending the stair, the first floor geometry rotates around you delivering a clear legibility of its alignment with the sawtooth roofs above. A large window above the stair heats the first floor concrete slab, which transmits warmth throughout the core of the house utilising a passive solar heating system based on the 1970s Trombe wall method.
Clerestories created by these roofs throw north light into high vaulted rooms, and lead to a terrace in the sky, in contrast to the cozy snug below. Its glass rails cut diagonally, repeating a theme of movement and change.
This home is about valuing and celebrating its setting and context, as well expressing the intentions of its occupants.
