The Shingle House

Dungeness, United Kingdom

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The Shingle House

Dungeness, United Kingdom

Firm

NORD Architecture

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2010

The Shingle House is located in Dungeness, kent on the South East coast of England. Dungeness is a place without walls or fences, It’s Britain’s only desert, a shingle wasteland punctuated by strange plants and even stranger human interventions. It is home to a peculiar assortment of buildings and activities, from tiny fishermen's huts to a giant nuclear power station by way of lighthouses and a miniature steam railway. Once considered the back of beyond, it was a place of squatter communities. Today it is borderline fashionable, a nature reserve and a conservation area. In this surreal landscape the silence is broken only by the changing patterns of the weather and the waves breaking on the shingle coastline.Dungeness is a site of international importance for coastal geomorphology, both as the largest cuspate shingle foreland in Britain (Britain’s only desert) and as an integral part of a system of barrier beaches extending 40Km from Fairlight to Hythe. These beaches reflect some 5000 years of coastal development and provide an exceptional record of Holocene coastal changes.Despite adverse climatic conditions, with temperature extremes, exposure to wind and salt spray, and frequent drought Dungeness is still home to some 600 species of plants with flora on the shingle ridges unique within a British context. Dungeness is a key British shingle site, both in terms of the range of botanical communities and the large area of vegetated shingle.The uniqueness of this coastal landscape attracts a diverse group of visitors; researchers, scientists, botanists and bird watchers (Dungeness is famous as a bird migration study point) are attracted by this natural ecology and as such the opportunity to design a holiday/study home for agroup of visually Intrigued individuals fascinated by the surrounding ecosystem and looking for a place to retreat from this landscape and store their visual apparatus (binoculars, tripods, cameras, Digiscope and magnifiers) was one where we would adopt similar techniques of observation to help log and sketch our findings. Our Dungeness sketchbook is similar to the birdwatchers ‘logbook’, systematic records of daily observations with detailed notes and a record of essential data such as date, locations, and weather as well as notes of conversations withfellow ‘twitchers’. These notes and observations become our archeology of ideas, which inform the design of the buildings on the site. At Dungeness the problem was set by the brief and the context, how to tackle each of these is answered by our invention.The starting point in the development of the design for the new house was to ensure it is considerably more efficient than current standards, and a huge improvement to the efficiency of the previous house. The superstructure of the house consists of a closed timber kit built around a 150 m2 concrete ‘marsh’ slab (which traces the lines of the existing building footprint) and a concrete spine with chimney, stair, hearth, kitchen and bath, then clad in a timber shingle and vertical board with a black ‘tar’ protective coat.The shingle beach at Dungeness is unstable and has a very low safe bearing capacity, this requires the use of a 300mm thick re-enforced concrete slab that is cast directly onto the top of the shingle surface like a floating mass of reinforced concrete. A black bitumen protective coat is applied to the slab edge. The chimney which sits on top of a thickened area of slab is partitioned with one side acting as the flue for a wood burning stove and the other housing the soil vent and air discharge pipes. The chimney is the only concrete element to be seen from outside, whilst contrasting with the tarred external walls, gives an indication of the materiality within. In undertaking the design of the ‘Shingle House’ our reference points were both the local vernacular style and the traditional building method of wrapping a structure in one continuous material. The proposal is for the external skin of the new dwelling be entirely ‘cloaked’ with a combination of tarred timber cut shingles and timber boards, of which belies the prefabricated system beneath.

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The Shingle House

Dungeness, United Kingdom

The Shingle House

Dungeness, United Kingdom

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team