This scheme posed architect Edgley Design with a challenge: to create the best possible quality of space within a very constrained site. Ingenuity was required to create a sense of light and space in the house, which could be 26 metres long and only 4 metres wide and with no windows allowed to the side.
The solution was an enclosed double-height tube with glazed ends, carefully oriented to ensure privacy, and with a stair lightwell bringing light and air to the centre of the building. A full-length basement adds volume to the building, and a garden lightwell lights an intimate underground master bedroom.
The house’s personality derives from its interior. All joinery, from the wardrobes and cabinets to the stair, was architect designed and hand-made. This gives the house a coherent identity both inside and out.
The house’s most notable feature is the staircase, made with a laser-cut steel stringer. The stair is 60 mm thick and the stringers are end-supported only, with a gap to the sides giving the impression that the stairs are floating unsupported. The stair is faced in walnut. In the stairwell hangs a three-storey-high chandelier that was hand-made by the architects on site using 580 metres of fibre optic cable and slivers of acrylic. The stairwell acts as a passive stack vent, with every habitable room in the house having a ventilation panel.
The extreme narrowness of the site meant traditional concrete piles would be too wide to create a usable basement. Instead 6-metre-long, 70 mm steel screw piles were inserted at 600 mm centres, and once the site was excavated, reinforcement was welded directly to these exposed piles to create a retaining wall only 300 mm thick.
The superstructure was built using environmentally friendly Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) of insulation sandwiched between Oriented Strand Board (OSB). These were machined in Devon, prefabricated and transported to site. The panels were installed in a fortnight, reducing disruption to neighbours on a tight site. The resulting shell is highly insulated and uses 50% less wood than a traditional timber frame.
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