Early Designs

Initial sketches established that vertical circulation and utility space would best be positioned in the boundary-locked area of the old stone building. It is almost impossible to get natural light in there, except from the roof. Although tempted to put the living room and kitchen on the first floor (to give them an increased feeling of spaciousness and light) we preferred to keep the direct link with the garden so that dining and sitting could spill out into the open air in summer.
Most of the design development centred on the replacement elevation and the new front addition.

The whole front of the building was in a very poor state of repair and would not last very much longer. How to handle overlooking issues was a significant design generator, suggesting ideas of screens or shutters. When you start thinking about a composition there is always a tendency for symmetry to take over. At one stage there was a gable at roughly the mid point. In hindsight it was probably just as well the planners didn't like this feature (it contradicted their policy on 'barn conversions'). I managed to fight off the symmetrical urge. I had a feel for how the new front should look - a level of complexity that would allow windows to be placed more or less to suit the function of the room behind without upsetting the overall balance. I wanted to compose the elevation with a series of layers that would recede into the building. This might start with the shutters or shading devices, extend through the cladding to the inward opening windows and the timber frame structure. Added to this was a desire to create a band of glass between the eaves and the cladding to give the impression that the roof would be floating over the walls. Quite a lot to play with.

To get the amount of floor space we wanted meant extending beyond the footprint of the original building. Creating the right amount of internal space but leaving a decently sized (and shaped) garden involved some juggling. The first sketches were very free-form and organic, but gradually crystalized along more orthogonal lines. The residual effect of these curves is seen in the circular pond forming a barrier between the private and semi-public sections of the garden.

At the time I was experimenting with an A7 format for design sketches. This is actually tiny but seemed to suit the process, fitted in between work and home (mainly on the train). Ideas were sketched out in broad outline - all the detail allowed on a sheet of paper four inches by three. These could be literally shuffled around as the design developed. certain aspects could be discarded easily and without fuss leaving other ideas intact.