Ty Pren

Trallong, United Kingdom

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Ty Pren

Trallong, United Kingdom

Firm

Feilden Fowles

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2011

Situated in the midst of the Brecon Beacons, this linear Greenfield site in the village of Trallong has a southerly aspect and fine views towards Pen Y Fan. The rich local vernacular inspired the concept of a modern 'long house', following the contours of the land, embedding itself in the slope of the hill and responding to the prevailing conditions. We spent two years researching and developing this design through site visits, models and prototypes. The design evolved into a crisp extrusion using skilled craftsmen to deliver a high-tech building. This period was used to procure local materials, research and to develop our Welsh vernacular adaptation. The typology of the long house leant itself to a passive solar plan, enhanced by the topography and aspect of the site. Contemporary construction techniques have delivered a thoroughly modern and high performance building, which responds to the landscape. The design was environmentally driven throughout. The passive solar design strategy uses every natural energy source available, and supplements these with active features such as the log boiler.Ty Pren was first conceived in 2005 by our clients, Gavin and Vina Hogg, committed environmentalists responsible for managing the Penpont Estate (recently awarded the Forestry Commission’s ‘Wales Business and Sustainability’ award), with the desire to create a uniquely environmental building drawing strongly from the welsh vernacular. They placed their faith in Feilden Fowles, a young design team straight out of Part 1 and embarking on our first major project. This precedent of mutual trust and good will underpinned by a shared commitment to sustainability and green design, was shown by the entire design and construction team. This enabled the delivery of an exceptional building, small in scale but with huge ambitions. The client, acting as a construction manager, had a holistic environmental approach that facilitated the efficient delivery of a sustainable building within a tight budget, and ensured both the design and its delivery remained under continued scrutiny. The embodied energy of materials was under constant review and often took precedent over cost.Due to the particularly sensitive location, situated on the edge of the Brecon Beacons national park, discussions on the vernacular were numerous throughout the early stages of design. Phrases like ‘sense of space’ and ‘local identity’ are abundant in the current debate regarding Welsh Architecture. Mathew Griffith’s suggested in ‘About Wales’ that ‘...the concept of ‘place’ is located at the heart of a fresh way of doing things. We need to be more effective in defining both the character of places and the value and significance that people attach to them...’ The real strength and identity of the Welsh culture is found in their simple plain chapels and vernacular buildings embedded in the countryside, gradually added to and elaborated. We were keen to take reference from these while avoiding simply reproducing an explicit version of the historic vernacular, an approach that would devalue the original. Instead we hoped to reinterpret, not necessarily by imitating historic details or using authentic materials, but through a subtle reinterpretation of familiar forms and ideas coupled with an holistic approach to environmental sustainabilty.