Somers House

The Somers house represents a trajectory of investigations in our practice.  The propositions evident in the completed project exemplify the satisfying complexities of the house as an architectural genre.

This is the second house we have completed for this Client, and we have known the site for many years, visiting the previous house as friends.  This helped both us and the Client to naturalise some of the qualities of the place, to react instinctively to weather, views and the passage of the sun, but also to form an emotional attachment to the landscape – the trees, the dunes, the water.

The new house replaced a building which was the repository of good memories but which was damp, poorly organised, had no direct sun and was at the end of its useful life.  A new house needed to solve these problems with some important new requirements – wheelchair accessibility to all parts of the site and zoning to reflect a changed and changing family - with grown up children, the prospect of grandchildren and the need to make a place for multi-family gatherings.

And of course a good house is not merely practicality and accommodation, it should reflect and build on the particularities and mythology of its inhabitants, it should have a nuanced but emphatic relationship to its place and it should be sufficiently flexible to imagine a diversity of inhabitations and future lives.  Of course, it should minimise energy use and be sufficiently robust and enduring to justify the embodied energy in its construction.

The morphology and materiality of the building is derived through multiple considerations – the shou sugi ban treated accoya cladding is durable and low-maintenance but being black is also recessive to the landscape, the vaguely zoomorphic façade (consisting of a shallow cave-like arch and strategically placed oculi) is inscrutable for privacy but also to inspire curiosity and engage imagination.  The principal living area inhabits a raised glass pavilion running transverse to the site which frames views through the dune plantings to the beach (looking south) but which also captures northern sun along its length.

Spatially the house is divided into apartments, a main bedroom suite is attached to the principal living areas for the most frequent users.  This zone connects in an enfilade and is self-contained, even cosy.  Further up the site and separated by a wind-protected terrace are bedrooms, bathroom and living room which provide flexible accommodation for singles, couples and provision for children either on day-beds in the room or by converting the living space to a bunk-room.  Below the living room and on grade with the sea-front lawn is another bedroom suite with a flexible space for living or sleeping but which is currently used for exercising.  These three parts are connected via a three level stair and lift tower lined in ochre render and Douglas Fir – moving through it the experience is intentionally medieval – enclosed, private, intense – a threshold to each space it connects and a dignified progress for a wheelchair.

Colour is everywhere in this house – an intense, earthy palette derived from the ochres of a Queenie McKenzie painting – our response to the Clients’ request for the vitality of Luis Barragan’s saturated chromatic.  Colour was a journey through the process and a continuing conversation with our Clients – an exploration of emotional states as much as hue, tint, tone and shade.  The house is completed by a garden  from our regular collaborator, Amanda Oliver – a blithe and eclectic synthesis of existing trees and plants incorporating an exotic gully of tree pansies, a lawn and indigenous regeneration.  The result, a seaside garden in an idealised wilderness.