Limestone
Load-bearing, quarried within the region and left unsealed.
Architecture · Interiors
Spaces that make room for life.
A small practice working on houses, mostly rural, mostly for people who intend to stay. We draw slowly, build carefully, and turn down more work than we take.
Scroll to lift the roof.
Roof 0%
Courtyard House · 1:50 maquette
Selected projects
Three houses, one idea about enclosure.
Four low wings around a planted void, so every room faces inward and the wind stays outside. The roof is timber over limestone, deliberately heavy where the walls are thin.
The site is flat, exposed and beautiful in one direction only. Rather than orient the house toward the view and fight the wind for nine months a year, we turned it inward and cut one long aperture through the north wing. The view arrives framed, once, and the courtyard does the rest.
A single bar set along the contour, lifted at one end so the ground runs underneath it rather than being cut away.
The client wanted a basement. The slope wanted to stay where it was. Lifting the eastern end on four piers gave the same floor area, kept the water table alone, and produced a sheltered undercroft that has become the part of the house they actually use.
Rammed earth walls with a clay render, built by the contractor who supplied the soil from two fields away.
Rammed earth is slow, and the programme had to absorb that. In exchange the walls regulate humidity without mechanical help, the colour matches the lane it sits on, and the material cost of the envelope was lower than the brick alternative it replaced.
Courtyard House
Walk the plan.
Room 1
Courtyard
The room the house is built around. Paved in the same limestone as the floors inside, so the threshold reads as a change of light rather than a change of material.
42 m² · open to sky
Palette
Four materials, used honestly.
Clay render
Mixed to the colour of the soil on site, applied by hand.
Timber
Structural roof beams, oiled once and never again.
Olive
Planting that survives the wind and asks for nothing.
How we work
Four stages, eighteen months, one house at a time.
Walk the site
Before drawings, a day on the land in the weather it usually has. Most of our decisions are made here.
Test in card
Physical models at 1:100 before anything is drawn properly. Cardboard finds problems a render hides.
Draw it fully
Every junction resolved on paper. Builders should not have to invent details on site.
Stay through the build
Weekly on site until handover. The last ten per cent is where a house is won or lost.
Enquiries
We take two new houses a year.
If you have land, or are close to buying it, that is the right moment to talk. Send the location, roughly what you want to build and when you would like to be living in it.