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24 I DESIGN
or life on the edge, the sitting room of Paul and Helen Owers's house takes some beating. It's on the first fioor, but there's no ground fioor underneath, only fresh Cornish air and a vertiginous drop to a hillside garden that slopes steeply down to the creek below. Perched above the Fal estuary, on the south Cornish coast between 1ruro and Falmouth, it's a glazed eyrie from where you can gaze seven miles down the water at a constantly changing panorama of cloud formations, birds and treetops, grazing cows and the comings and goings of tides and boats. It's why the owners have hardly watched TV since they moved in. The brief they gave to their architect, John Pardey, was to design a home that made the most of the view. He's certainly done that. The L-shaped house is split into two distinct halves: a two -storey, fourbedroom wing with expansive glazing facing the water; and, at an angle to this, the other section projects in a draMatic cantilever towards the creek. As you walk into this floating open-plan space, with full-height glazing all down the left wall, you come to the kitchen first, then the dining table and the sitting area, with a bright green contemporary sofa positioned above the steepest drop. It's a stylish front-row seat: the end wall it faces is also glazed, giving the sitting room 180-degree views. "It's like being in an aircraft when you're at the end of the room, as if you're standing in the sky," says Pardey, who created a differently framed view from every room, including the master ensuite. The most sweeping views are from the cantilevered wing, where the glazing faces the estuary and slides open onto a terrace hanging over the garden. "We moved here because we wanted a complete lifestyle change from London," says Helen, 53. "We'd been working fiat out and had had enough." The couple wanted a more outdoor life "with much more ofaconnectiontothena~
environment", adds Paul, also 53. They need only look through all that glazing to connect with nature, but Paul, Helen and their daughter, Above, Bo, the Holly, 14, have taken to the Cornish family's sprocker coast lifestyle like the proverbial ducks to water, kayaking to the : (springer and ¡ cocker spaniel pub, taking their newly acquired cross), surveys dog, Bo, for beach walks and sailing inswnmer. the Fal estuary. Yet they never imagined they'd The extensive be thrust into the spotlight. Next glazing and week, you can see the house on the terraces have small screen in the launch episode been designed to for the second series of Channel4's make the most of the views Grand Designs: House of the Year. Run in conjunction with the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), it celebrates the best in housing design. Pardey is delighted, especially because he has pulled off the challenging feat of creating a successful sequel: this isn't the first ¡ spectacular house to be built on this particular Cornish hillside. Just below the Owers's place is another modernist masterpiece, Creek Vean, built exactly 50 years ago by the young Richard Rogers and
Norman Foster. One of their first commissions, the sharp-angled design of glass and blockwork was considered ahead of its time in 1966 and still looks imposing today. "It was pretty intimidating having one of the most significant houses of the 1960s on the same slope," Pardey says. "I didn't want to copy it, but I wanted to acknowledge its presence." So he mirrored Creek Vean's ~ unusual design of two halves: it's also : a two-storey block, paired with a single-storey one and connected by a glazed corridor. "They complement one another," says Meredith Bowles, an architect who is on the judging panel for the House of the Year award. "They both have expansive glazing and a similar relationship to the water, but while the Owers's house is balanced on the top, Creek Vean is buried into the hillside. Theirs appears lightweight, the other heavyweight."