Frames of the forest: A house drawn from early modernist essays stands in woodland in the west country, an integral part of the English landscape - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2002

The site of the house, by Niall McLaughlin Architects, in the west of England is spread across crest and western slope of a high ridge densely covered in beech woods. You approach the house from the east, passing down a long drive bordered by trees and newly planted snowdrops. Arriving at the western brow, you see the house below you, a light and partly transparent two-storeyed structure of steel, glass and Douglas fir backed into the steep slope. Through and beyond the building, through a clearing in the surrounding wood, you can see a vast and misty spread of English countryside.

Sheltered by the hillside, the structure seems to have just alighted. In this setting it is exotic -- a Californian Case Study house, reinterpreted, moved on in time and transported to the soft light and subdued colours of pastoral England. But in organizing the building, Niall McLaughlin began with the Tugendhat villa built by Mies van der Rohe overlooking the city of Brno in Czechoslovakia. Like the villa, this house has a strong visual relationship with the landscape, distinct areas of accommodation linked by the flat roof, and a curving wall of translucent glass that wraps around an inner stair. The curved form breaks the building's predominantly orthogonal organization; and, as in Mies' villa, entrance to the voluminous double-height living room is made all the more striking by passage from the enclosed stair.

McLaughlin's design was prompted by the clients' desire for a new relationship with their dwelling. They had previously occupied a Georgian rectory which, they felt, dictated the manner in which daily life was conducted. They wanted a 'more open building with rooms that could be inhabited even when empty' and constant connection to the surroundings. The architects' response was a series of visually intersecting volumes and a route devised so that extraordinary views to the west are framed by the building, taken away, and given back. And through windows on all sides, are frames of the forest. Like a previous work by McLaughlin -- the winged shack for a wildlife photographer in Northamptonshire (AR September 1998) -- this house is of, rather than in, the landscape, a building of light and shadow, and reflection.

There was an existing building on the site -- a dilapidated house constructed in the 1950s (by the Dean of Windsor for his family). Once demolished, it provided the footprint for the new building, which was turned very slightly on its axis to face due west. On plan, the house is a simple rectangle running north-south, with a single-storey wing. This shoots out west at right angles to the main body of the house, and contains a glass-walled swimming pool with a flooded roof. Entering at first floor level over a bridge, you are delivered to a covered wooden deck inset with a square pool of water under an open porthole. From here, your eye travels the length of the watery roof to the distant horizon and sky.

The wing signals a division between two parts of the house. To the north is a first floor office with guest rooms below; on the larger south side are the living quarters, at the core is the great double-height sitting room which is overlooked by the main bedroom above kitchen and dining room. West and south walls here are almost entirely glazed and give onto broad terraces over a newly planted wild garden of grasses, bulbs and iris siberica. At first floor level, all volumes along the west are visually interconnected by internal windows and slots, so that from the office you can see through the length of the building.

Within the expressed structure of the building, materials and finishes are few and austere. Beech from trees felled around the house has been used for floors, honed granite for kitchen fittings and pale stone at either end of the swimming pool which itself is lined with black tiles. The pool house, heated and filled with water to the brimming edges and up to the base of the glazing, projects into the middle distance. In diving into it, you dive into the view.