The house replaces a large suburban style two-storey house in a rural site within the New Forest. The design responds to both the client’s desire to live in close contact with nature together with the idea of making the house invisible from the public realm to deal with restrictive local planning policy directives on ‘traditional form and detail’.
This has resulted in a long, low pavilion that ‘touches the earth lightly’. Within north-south orientated the box-like form, the house provides three bedrooms that open up to the east and morning light, and a large open-plan living-dining-kitchen area, together with a master bedroom suite and study, that opens up to the west with views into a pine copse.
The low-impact design on the site is extended into the use of ground source heat pump, rainwater recycling and high levels of insulation that also make the house low-impact environmentally. The house is timber-framed, sweet chestnut-clad and has a sedum roof – a large brick chimney and hearth built in reclaimed bricks from the demolished house anchors this delicate pavilion to the site.
More photos of this project, taken by James Morris, can be seen here on our flickr.
