FROM COMICS TO COPINGS

Architectural and landscaping products from Welsh Slate feature on award-winning illustrator’s new home.

Award-winning British comic book artist and illustrator Charlie Adlard is enjoying a new lease of life in a new home featuring a building material that is seriously old!

Charlie has been a “veteran” of the comic industry for more than 25 years and recently finished a 15-year spell working on The Walking Dead series which was adapted for television by US network AMC in 2010. Charlie himself appeared in the pilot as a zombie extra!

Now free to pick and choose his own projects, including life drawing sessions and single illustrations for music, films and other media, Charlie is working from his new home on the banks of the River Severn in his hometown of Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

The house, which was designed as one of a pair by AHR Architecture, uses Welsh Slate products on various aspects – as vertical cladding on elevational features including a “chimney” on the house, and for hard landscaping, as walling and copings to terraces and walls in the landscaped gardens.

The architectural and landscaping products manufactured by Welsh Slate at its main Penrhyn quarry near Bangor are produced from a material that is 500 million years old, but at Charlie’s three-storey, split-level house, it has been used to complement the contemporary aesthetics of the building.

The cladding is from Welsh Slate’s Penrhyn Heather range, in a Honed finish, while the pillared walling is from the same Penrhyn quarry with a textured finish and the same Honed finish also features on the copings.

Charlie said he specified the Welsh Slate products for a variety of reasons. One was sustainability (the garden features an extensive photovoltaic array), the other sentimentality!

“The house, as much as possible, is hopefully as environmentally friendly as we could make it, so a natural product like Welsh slate works with that remit. We also wanted to use as much locally sourced product as possible.”

He also explained that his family has a strong connection to North Wales. His wife is Welsh - her family come from Bangor and Anglesey - so to them it made sense to source local materials from that area to complement their house design. They had always known about Welsh Slate, having visited the area many times, and eventually having a holiday home in Beaumaris that virtually looks across the Menai Strait to the quarry.

Charlie added: “The use of the Welsh Slate products has been mainly decorative, and they have made a striking natural addition to the modern look of the building. It’s the first time we have used Welsh Slate and we love it!”