The Watson House

Add To Collection

The Watson House

Firm

John Pardey Architects

Type

Residential › Private House

The brief began with the idea of occupying the house for short breaks – a holiday home that is easy to use and the clients wished to live in contact with nature. They wanted a house that offered the opposite to their day to day urban life – a place that breathed, that was open, light, easy to maintain and interacted with the garden and woodland.The brief was clear that the parents wanted to have space between their two teenage children’s bedrooms and their own and also provide a room for guests, but a single social space for cooking, eating and relaxing together.Planning constraints:The site sits within the New Forest National Park that was established in 2006. As a new authority, it adopted very stringent planning guidelines that made our proposal sit at odds with their idea of the built heritage of the New Forest.The application met with a refusal on the basis that it ‘would not reflect the built character of the New Forest National Park’. The application was won on appeal as we argued that the setting was such that the house would be literally hidden from public view and that there was no such thing as a ‘New Forest vernacular’ – the Inspector agreed that the design would have no impact on the Forest setting and that ‘the architectural quality of the proposed development and its suitability for the site would ensure that it would make a more positive contribution to the character and appearance of the area’.Materials and methods of construction:The design was the result of the idea of a simple linear single-storey form that ‘touched the earth lightly’. Two linear concrete foundations ran along each side of the house (with a basement in the central section) and these supported laminated timber floor, wall and roof panels from KLH timber. The panels, craned over the trees from the road, were erected in less that one week and slender steel columns were employed to support the 15 metre long opening facing onto the woodland. The design tolerances of this system allowed for windows to be pre-ordered and this in turn allowed the house to be weather-tight in a matter of weeks.The house was clad externally with rigid insulation and a rainscreen of open jointed, sweet chestnut slats over a black mesh. The roof was a single ply membrane.

Product Spec Sheet

Were your products used?

Join as a manufacturer to add your products.

Collaborating Firms

Was your firm involved? Add it now.

Team

Were you involved? Add yourself.

Keep Exploring Architizer by Creating a Free Account or Logging in.

The Watson House

The Watson House

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team