Gables’ is a striking low-impact village home. Designed to be our retired clients’ forever home, the house is accessible, highly contemporary, low energy, sustainable and secure. The clients wanted it to be not too big for two, but big enough to accommodate village parties and wider family coming to stay. The house is knitted into the local community, and so in order for the house to have a low impact on the village setting and the immediate neighbors it was essential that our design encapsulated the character of the village and the wider site. CDC studio replicated the thatched barn with weatherboarding, incorporating into the new volumes local crafts and materials of flint, red brick, timber shutters and estate fencing complementing this with the use of zinc to echo the agricultural aesthetic of the original land use.
Adopting a thoroughly modern approach, the larger part of the new house was set back to retain existing views of the thatched barn from the village road and kept deliberately low in height to accommodate the immediate neighbors’ views. This resulted in the low-lying folding glazed volumes designed to accommodate the 200m sq client footprint of space.
The site is landscaped to lead visitors towards the entrance and the clients’ front-facing study, whilst not being able to access the main house without an invitation. A narrow, curved hallway draws you into the main house. The kitchen, dining and living spaces are open-plan to allow for social gatherings. The kitchen sits under a column-free, steel rod-hung mezzanine with acoustic damping which was rigorously engineered to avoid the reverberating noise. This creates a sense of enclosure in the kitchen whilst allowing CDC to achieve the fully flexible family/party space requested beyond. The folding roofline shapes are crafted and lined in silver fir timber plus acoustic felt, affording a very warm and cozy feel to the high-volume spaces. The long underside of the roofline is visible at the full length of the building and delicately supported by a single steel post sitting onto a concrete sheer wall. High-level glazing allows the roofline to be viewed through the house, connecting the open plan space with the hallway and study beyond. Internally a bespoke dining room bench adds a sense of fun and color using the client’s family tartan as fabric to the seating area.
