Project: Three Houses at Withdean Road, Brighton
The site lies on a hillside to the northern edge of Brighton and is within an affluent residential district, enjoying views south across the city to the sea and east across the South Downs. The development of three detached houses for the open market was founded on a brief to create high quality, contemporary homes without recourse to the rather cliched zinc roof and white rendered modernist designs not uncommon in Brighton – while also making a family of houses that also assert a subtle individuality.
The houses are conceived as a grey brick base containing entrance, service accommodation, a day room to enjoy the garden and bedrooms – this extends downwards to a lower ground floor at the rear of the sloping site providing additional bedroom spaces. To the front of the site, the brick structure forms an ‘L’ shape, integrating a single storey garage that protects the garden from the public view in each case. The street edge is enclosed at ground level by brick walls and sliding slatted timber gates and screens, so that the main expression of each house to the street is an upper level timber ‘box’.
‘boxes’ and anchor the house to its site. The northernmost house, sitting at the highest point on the site has a rooftop ‘gloriette’ beneath an awning allowing for the most dramatic views. Each house has an efficient gas condensing boiler set at the lower ground floor level venting through the chimney and is supplemented by rooftop solar thermal arrays, which combined with a highly insulated and air-tight construction, will make the houses highly sustainable.
These timber-clad ‘boxes’ perch on top of the masonry presenting a narrow frontage to the street, while extending back into the site to contain the main living spaces – study, utility, kitchen, dining and living room. The living space opens out onto a roof terrace at first floor level that is in turn faced to the southern side by an open metal-clad structure that frames the distant sea views. While seen as a coherent group, each house is given individuality by subtle changes to fenestration to the street front, and the upper timber ‘boxes’ are in a different coloured stains, based on a palette of natural autumnal colours. To each house, a brick chimney rises up from the base to connect to the timber
PROJECT DETAILS Client: Status: Contract value:
Baobab Developments Ltd. Completion 2015 c. £2,000,000.00
Landscape: M+E Engineers: NIA:
Paul Templeton --c.400M2 per house