Anningsley Park House

Single Family House, 2008
Location: Ottershaw, Surrey
Un-built

A new single-family house is to replace a small gabbled cottage where the client-family had lived for several years. The brief was developed with an appreciation of the family’s day-to-day activities and their already existing relationships with this alluring site. A tailor-made, environmentally mindful home, enhancing the family’s engagement with nature, was desired.

 

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The proposed house is located on the edge of the wood with predominantly southern orientation. One approaches the house via a concealed path through the wood to the main entrance, which is formed at the junction of internal spaces. Upon entering, the interior and extensive lawn are revealed while a chain of spaces with subtle shifts and junctions creates a variety of inward and outward looking situations.

Rooms are orientated to engage with specific parts of the landscape at different times of the day. Carefully framed views include: a beautiful freestanding beech tree, the open lawn, a silver birch meadow, the thick wood canopy.

In a practical sense spaces are considered to be either ‘clean’ (living room, study and bedrooms) or ‘dirty’ (garage, kitchen and laundry). Clean spaces are understood to be ‘soft’ and expressed in a light-weight material, such as timber. Dirty spaces are understood to be ‘hard’ and expressed in a heavy, monolithic material, such as concrete. The house acquires its expression based on a composition of hard and soft spaces in response to family habits and site conditions.

 

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