ABSTRACT
NB: It was quite a precise moment of change. It was rectilinear for quite a long time and we were looking at these volumes and orienting them this way and that, and having roofs pitching this way or that way, and we decided in the end it was quite a generic volume and almost un-designable; a found volume that we then renovated. We just found this one [the existing shed on the site] and repeated it and re-oriented it. We chose the colour that’s as close as possible to that old weathered galvanised; it’s like a filing cabinet grey. But there was always this thing about how customised, how site specific, how do you make something site specific? Even though we’re starting with a ‘found object’, it wasn’t really a found object. KH: What specifically was the phenomenon on the site that generated the desire to have that tension, the geometry that swings? Because to me it’s not obvious; what struck you, what was so striking? NB: It was about picking up on a kind of large scale, an orientation of where the room is facing. It was about orienting the room towards the bigger landscape. It is also about the brief. This is the ‘parents’ retreat’, the teenage children can take over the old house and the parents can get away and have their backs literally to the house and focus completely on the landscape. It was part of the brief: the sense of removal. You go back and forth between the two, as there’s only one kitchen. It’s not like another whole house. KH: It’s quite subtle. And yet it has a sort of an a¯nity to, say, more dramatic gestures like that Boyd house where there is a big fan, an arc, and the posts are set out on a radial plan [Robin Boyd, Lloyd House, Brighton, 1959-1960]. It’s like an opening of the fan
towards the view. There it is a lot more expressionist, if you like. It fits that period of architecture, but here it seems a very pared-back version. NB: For whatever reason, we were very interested in having an e²ect that you discovered rather than noticed. So that you might enter and you really don’t realise that there’s a funny geometry, but by the time you get to the end, you’ve felt the e¢ect of that geometry. And it was something that you don’t see as a form. If you take a photograph, the perspective of the camera is more distorted than the building.
