Our ideas investigate the house typology as a simple 2 storey house with bedrooms situated on the ground floor with a flexible inter-changeable open volume living space to the upper floor taking strong advantage of the surrounding picturesque and romantic scenery beyond.

Our proposals consider the value and flexibility of the unit type and exploits opportunities in the house volume and its associated house plot – Thus allowing our typology to be considered as a 1 bed, or 2 bed, or 3 bed home depending on the occupants needs and requirements – A flexibility home typology – ‘A lifetime home’.

The essence of our house typology is designed to facilitate and allow for simple adaption by the occupants where for single homeowners, young couples, home workers, newly growing families or for the extended family. The intention is that the unit is constructed from energy efficient and locally sourced materials with the ambition to provide a very affordable entry level unit, generously proportioned and offering a volume with great opportunity to self-custom over time.

The location is distinctively unique, and we believe in terms of language and scale the buildings should be developed with an appropriate character forming a sensitive connection and continuity to context. The analysis of the site has identified a number of important themes and concepts which together form a rural character and in turn should influence the development site and surrounding area.

Our conceptual thinking in establishing territories takes clue from the Yorkshire Dales landscape and the stone walls allotting farm land – Walls define hierarchies of spaces. Our approach to the defined competition site is to consider the inherent idea of the collective ‘community’ and the ‘shared’ whilst also retaining the idea of private individual plots. The proposal takes on the wider idea of the cluster diagram around a common landscaped courtyard. Each individual house has its own defined plot, garden and utility structure but together the houses are organised in relationship to each other by aligning entrance threshold ‘porch’ offering a sense of community control and security. The plan offers a zonal pattern separating path and road, by foot and by car, while both cumulating at a shared space ‘the courtyard’.

Our approach principle takes a 2 storey rectilinear plan volume, considers how spaces flow and applies a layer of key spaces to the flexible spaces;

A Vestibule – The in-between threshold that provides a space at the front door for storage and a space to accommodate meters, services and utilities.

A Utility Structure – An adaptable space practical for storage, home office, garage or outdoor bedroom aiding flexibility of use.

A Sun Room – a versatile high level internal space, a space for relaxing and connecting to nature and the view.

The interiors are expressed as raw but well-made allowing for the principle construction elements to form the ‘look and feel’ of each house. The entry level floors are polished concrete to the ground floor and timber boarding to the upper volumes. Walls area predominately plastered and ceilings, windows and doors take form of their construction pine treated timber.

Our design concept embraces a cluster ‘pinwheel’ plan for two storey houses. Our design layout carefully responds to the topography by adopting an entrance courtyard level that minimises the net cut and thus reduces the volume of exported material whilst balancing the need to respect the scale of neighbouring housing.

The design allows for all of the four houses to share a common level access to the shared courtyard. The ethos of the design proposition promotes the reduction of the car encouraging inhabitants towards a sustainable means of living. The permeable courtyard surface is proposed as common access point for the site by foot and vehicle but also intends to act as an infrastructural SUDS element to deal with surface water across the site. Equally in order to minimise light spillage low level surface lights are proposed as means of protecting the dark night sky.

Our approach to landscape looks to embrace biophilic design principles throughout. In the gardens, timber crib walling, or possibly gabions, will be used to create the necessary platform level. The use of a waste quarry material has been explored for filling the gabions.  Our proposed private gardens and shared communal garden embraces native wildlife friendly species such as night flowering species, wildflower seed and perimeter indigenous ash trees to encourage ecology and biodiversity.