Hugh Strange Architects has combined domestic and agricultural typologies to produce a carefully considered courtyard house that complements its setting on the north Cornish coast.
Photos
Jason Orton
The north Cornish coast is more rugged, wetter and more windswept than the south coast, attracting more surfers than sailors. The cliffs bring to an abrupt end the irregular patchwork of farmland that extends back inland, interrupted occasionally by wooded valleys cut by little streams. Dense hedges hem narrow lanes through rolling fields.
A mile from the coast, down an unmade gravel track is the Farmworker’s House, a new dwelling built for the manager of a working farm. Designed by Hugh Strange Architects, it has an agricultural tie, and faces a new livestock shed built to house the herd of cows the manager looks after. The house is sited snugly in the south-east corner of the field to gain shelter from the wind from an adjoining patch of woodland. It is single storey, with a pitched roof, and L-shaped in plan, like the more lowly buildings around a typical West Country farmyard. Sited at the highest point in the field, the house surveys the scene even though its low form is introverted.
Full height openings establish a strong connection between the courtyard and house. Thick masonry walls finished with rough-cast lime render support a corrugated galvanised steel roof.
To build on a greenfield site is to fundamentally change the character of a place. The ripples of development spread out through the introduction of manmade materials, hard angles, alien colours. Views are interrupted, the soil is churned up and the surrounding territory is domesticated by landscaping and gardening. It is not that a natural state is being disturbed for the first time. The English landscape has been inhabited for thousands of years, with generations of people clearing trees, grazing, cultivating, enclosing, and now industrially farming the land. Around the field edges nature pushes in relentlessly in the form of hedgerows, woodland and scrub, waiting to reclaim any unmanaged ground.
The Farmworker’s House is barely visible from outside its immediate domain, concealed by trees, and it has a compact footprint intended to contain the extent of development. The other two sides of the ‘L’ are closed off with a garden wall, making a courtyard space for family activities, such as outdoor dining, play, drying washing and growing vegetables. By making a place for these activities, there is less incentive for domestic paraphernalia to sprawl into the field, which can be grazed right up to the building. Controlling the spread of the domestic realm allows the house, cowshed and landscape to retain their distinct characters while working harmoniously as an ensemble. The house is heated by a groundsource heat pump, an invisible connection between the dwelling and the land.
The house is approached obliquely towards an Iroko-lined porch near the corner of the plan.
Outside the walls are finished with rough-cast lime render, which was used traditionally in Cornwall until the 20th Century, and the roof is corrugated galvanised steel; materials that might be found on a humble farm building. You approach obliquely towards a porch near the corner, lined in unsealed Iroko, the same timber a local joiner used to make the windows. From a generous hallway you turn right to a wing of three bedrooms or straight ahead to a combined living, kitchen and dining space. On the corner, there is an office looking back towards the livestock shed, the largest window in the outer walls, and the interface between the manager’s home and working lives. Once inside, you discover the south-facing courtyard around which the domestic life of the house unfolds.
View from the hall looking towards the master bedroom. A cloister typology makes the inhabitants aware of the courtyard as they move around the house.
The walls and roof are made from hollow clay blocks and Douglas fir timber respectively.
There are obvious similarities with the square courtyard plans and L-shaped layouts of Jørn Utzon’s Kingo Houses and Alvar & Elissa Aalto’s Muuratsalo Experimental House. In the Kingo Houses, the bedroom corridor is on the outside, so the rooms look into the courtyard and few openings are needed in the wall facing the street. The Experimental House has its corridor on the inside, so bedrooms look out into the surrounding forest. For the Farmworker’s House, Hugh Strange started with the bedrooms facing the courtyard, but decided to reverse it so you have the pleasure of awareness of the courtyard while moving around the house, and as a nod to the cloister roots of the typology. The bedrooms have small horizontal windows on the outside for privacy and to maintain the enclosing quality of the walls, but their doors align with the corridor windows so they can borrow light from that direction as well.
Door to the house’s courtyard, a clearly defined domestic realm that reduces the temptation to claim the surrouding landscape as ‘grounds’.
From the entrance hall a wide, full-height opening leads down three steps into the open-plan living space, taking advantage of a level change in the site to give the main space more height and a grander scale. The opening to the bedroom wing by contrast is smaller, establishing a hierarchy between the private spaces and those visitors might use. The openings in the living space create an intriguing play of scales and associations. A series of vertical openings face the courtyard, while a small window high up on the gable end, like those sometimes found in barns, brings light filtering through the roof structure. Two smaller windows are carved through the thick outside walls to offer more specific views out to the landscape, and an even deeper recess houses a wood burner. The depth of the unadorned, plastered openings is reminiscent of both much older farmhouses, and Modernist precedents that channel a mediterranean vernacular.
Even though the house has underfloor heating, the intense warmth of a wood burner and the symbolism of the hearth still seem pertinent in a country house. On the outside the chimney, bigger than it needs to be functionally, provides a counterpoint to the horizontal volume of the house, anchoring it in the site.
From the entrance hall, a wide full-height opening leads down three steps into the open-plan living area, taking advantage of a level change in the site to give the space more height and a grander scale.
With a budget of less than £2,300/m², the construction had to be simple, and there is nothing ostentatious about the interior. The external walls are made from monolithic hollow clay blocks that can achieve good U-values without additional insulation. They are finished in unsealed lime-plaster, a more refined version of the external render, without any of the membranes and cavities that make standard forms of construction so fiddly to build well. Its thermal performance is good but not exceptional, and has been improved by adding additional external wall and roof insulation.
Model shots showing the relationship between the Douglas fir roof structure and solid masonry walls.
The most striking feature though is overhead. A local team of carpenters built the green Douglas fir roof structure, a unifying gesture that is exposed throughout the interior. Every third rafter has a collar tie that resists the outward thrust on the wall plate, which is secured to the wall with galvanised straps, the tops of which are visible poking up above the plaster. Hugh Strange has just completed his PhD at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design with a thesis that makes a case for an architecture that emerges from the process of construction. It is clear that this philosophy has driven the design here. There aren’t any structural gymnastics or grandiose gestures, just a simple palette of good quality materials assembled in a rigorous and considered way. It is almost standard stuff, but the choices about what to express are intriguing. Not every connection is expressed, just those things that are visible anyway, and the delivery is deadpan. There is no fuss made of the galvanised straps, nothing mannerist about them, they are just there.
The Farmworker’s House under construction. The dwelling sits in the south-east corner of the field where adjoining woodland provides shelter from the wind. A new livestock shed houses the cows that the manager looks after.
Such unity of materials and tone is very difficult to achieve, especially in a private house where the architect is always having to some extent accommodate the owner’s tastes. One fellow visitor found it very stark and said they couldn’t live in a house without any colour. There is colour of course, but it is that of the materials themselves – the rich orange-tinged Douglas fir roof structure, the ever-so-slightly pinkish tone of the lime plaster, and the dark blue-grey of the floors. And what brings it alive is the natural variation and depth within those materials – the lively grain of the Douglas fir and the gently swirling, lustrous surface of the plaster.
One of the joys of this house is the way it exhibits apparently contradictory effects simultaneously. Its presence on the site is modest but strong, its interior humble but sophisticated, its character domestic but agricultural. The components work with the subtle spatial moves to create an effect that is far greater than the sum of their parts. The Farmworker’s House shows how a new dwelling can be a harmonious addition to the rural landscape while expressing its own distinctive character.
Bigger than it needs to be, the chimney anchors the building to its site and acts as a counterpoint to the horizontal volume of the house.
Credits
Architect
Hugh Strange Architects
Structural engineer
Price & Myerss
Services engineer
Ritchie+Daffin
Planning consultant
Peter Wonnacott Planning
Selected subcontractors
and suppliers
Timber frame
Timber Workshop
Clay blocks
Wienerberger
Porotherm
Lime render/plaster
Heritage Cob & Lime
Heat pump
Kensa Heat Pumps
Fit-out joinery
Kington Carpentry
Floor tiles
Living Terracotta
Windows
Complete Joinery
& Design
Additional images
Source: Architecture Today
