The design process

Design was a long, often frustrating iterative process. Our architect, whom I believe we’ve developed a good working relationship with, helped translate our, often strong ideas into a technically feasible solution. As the design progressed he was able to grasp what we wanted to achieve and knew instinctively what we were likely to appreciate.

As mentioned, the external walls with openings were (almost) given and inside the staircase to the cellar was already built – it made sense to build further staircases above this. There was also a need for 2 columns on each floor. I had a strong desire to hide these. Minimalism itself couldn’t be the theme. What we did was think of how the house could function, what we wanted to emphasise and what we wanted to hide. In particular we thought of the views as someone moved through the house – how could we create destinations that could be explained with single objects and how could we use the walls to frame these and exaggerate the distances.The other aspect was the need to hide everything which wasn’t essential. To do this we realised we needed to create large volumes of storage and for this storage to be ‘invisible’ it needed to be seen as thick walls.

The ground floor concept came quickly. We defined two navigational axis and used these to create a floor plan which I believe is self evident in how the space will be used.

The first floor, or first and second caused many more problems. In the end, after many revisions we reverted back to the simplicity of the ground floor and created a design which solved all our problems with considerable flair.

With a pre-fab house like we were creating all the design decisions need to be done before construction. After spending from June to September getting the floor plans right we then spent September and October ‘filling in the gaps’, defining things such as what each cupboard would hold, whether we could get away with no handles (I thought that they were needless decoration), exact positioning of electricity points etc.

The construction started of the walls in mid November.