Project: The Sellers House
The brief for this holiday home was to create a modest house designed to enjoy the views, sun and quiet ambience of this part of the Isle of Wight on the site of a former vineyard. The design is based on a courtyard house form and it begins with a response to the physical characteristics of the context, with the idea of a ‘garden’ wall wrapping the northern and eastern sides. This wall provides shelter for the dwelling, embracing the path of the sun and distant views to the southwest. Living spaces open to the view through a glazed, double-height cedar frame; bedrooms nestle beneath a mono-pitch roof that opens onto the courtyard, while a high level slit allows the rising sun to enter the rooms.
While the design is not strictly a courtyard house, it begins as a response to the physical characteristics of the context, with the idea of a ‘garden’ wall wrapping the northern and eastern sides (against roadway and access track to a lower field). Within this wall, the dwelling is conceived as two distinct, but co-joined, cedar-clad wings of accommodation that contain living spaces and sleeping/ private spaces respectively, with an entrance formed through a small court at their junction. The house therefore encloses a new courtyard facing south-west, which is terraced with paved upper areas and a lower grass platform that begins to exploit the natural contours of the site.
the bedroom wing swooping low to a inner new courtyard, with slits on the higher side to allow a shaft of the rising sun into each bedroom. Within the dwelling, the monopitch section to the living wing is exploited in two ways, firstly by a double height cedar framed elevation that opens up to the views and the sun and secondly, incorporates client requirement of a raised timber mezzanine served by a skinny stair of cherry and steel on a slatted maple screen, envisaged as a quiet study area that enjoys the distant views.
The structure of the house is timber framed to enjoy a thermally efficient, sustainable and domestic quality, nestled quite literally against the wall container, which lends not only shelter but also a sense of solidity and security often lacking in purely timber constructions. In order to respond to the immediate scale of the neighbouring properties the design is single storey, with two opposing zinc clad monopitch roofs; the living wing rising up to the sun and view, keeping a low profile to the roadside, with
PROJECT DETAILS Client: Status: Contract value:
Paddy + Jacky Sellers Completed 2004 £280,000.00
Structural Engineer: Contractor:
Barton Engineers John Peck Construction