The challenge of utilizing stone in a fresh and dynamic way has been something of a hot topic lately. Renzo Piano found ingenious ways to modernize the sandstone of Malta in his Valetta City Gate master plan, and there have been numerous examples recently of cool, contemporary designs harnessing the age-old technique of gabion walling. But what about a construction material that dates back over 500 years in the history of Great British architecture?
London firm Skene Catling de la Peña offers an answer in the form of the Flint House, designed as a home and annex for Lord Rothschild in the grounds of his expansive Waddesdon Manor estate in Buckinghamshire and completed earlier this year. Its external façades are made from layers of flint, a type of quartz that has been harnessed by humans as far back as the neolithic age.
© James Morris
Flint is not a material typically seen within contemporary architectural design in the United Kingdom; it is more commonly associated with rural cottages and 500-year-old wool churches across the south of England. One exception is Nick Willson Architects’ bespoke house in London, which Wallpaper’s Johnathan Bell accurately described as “wearing its handcrafted nature on its sleeve.”
Skene Catling de la Peña took this notion a step further, creating a building that appears to have been hewn from the landscape itself, blending the artisan craft of flint wall construction with a highly contemporary form. Interrupting a perfectly level horizon line, the house appears as two wedges of splintered rock emerging from the ground as if generated by localized tectonic activity. Indeed, the structure’s primary material is indigenous to the region: swathes of flint are present within the chalk seam that runs through the home counties of England from the south coast to Norfolk.
© James Morris
The rough stone façades are engrained with a subtle hierarchy, the darkest obsidian shards of flint placed at the base of each wall via a technique called “galleting”: the insertion of small stone fragments into wet mortar during construction. Further up the external elevations, the color and textural quality of the flint transitions through finely knapped gray stones to slender blocks of white chalk so that the building appears to “dissolve into the sky.”
The striated appearance of the elevations continues on the roof, where terrazzo tiles in six different shades ascend the gentle slope. These steps are fully walkable, giving the house a terrain-like quality reminiscent of Snøhetta’s proposed Ludwig Museum in Budapest, but on a smaller, more domestic scale.
© James Morris
Inside, Skene Catling de la Peña sought to retain the building’s close connection to nature and the context of Buckinghamshire’s countryside. Open-plan common areas occupy the central section of the house, evolving to more intimate, private quarters via a transitional space that the architects describe as a “mysterious, internal cave.” This corridor is actually the most striking moment within the house interior: its narrowing walls are faced with rough flint, flanking a reflective “river” of shallow water that mirrors a ceiling of black glass above.
© James Morris
In contrast to this rugged, naturalistic environment, much of the living space is framed by sleek white walls separated from the ceiling by a three-inch shadow gap: this attention to detail is more often seen in a contemporary gallery than a private residence, a nod to the building’s secondary function as an artistic installation. Flint House was designed as part of a larger project entitled “Gesamtkunstwerk” — a total work of art — in which the architecture was explored and dissected by artists during the construction process.
© James Morris
Lord Rothschild and Skene Catling de la Peña invited photographers onsite to document the process and the structure itself in any way they liked, producing a variety of responses from an examination of the building’s unique materiality to a restaging of artworks from the Rothschild collection, located in Waddesdon Manor itself. The architects emphasize the value of these activities in capturing the fleeting moments of creation: “The responses transformed the ephemeral moments of the process of making architecture that are otherwise lost and fixed them forever.”
© James Morris
The linking of architecture and art in this way seems particularly appropriate for Flint House, a building read as an inhabitable sculpture or perhaps an atmospheric vessel half-submerged within the ocean of fields that make up this remote landscape. Whatever metaphor one might bestow upon it, one thing is clear: as an unconventional modern design built in a traditionally conservative region of rural England, this house represents an important moment in the history of British domestic architecture.