The Aviaries

A new home in the country, including an outdoor swimming pool, pavilion, and freshwater lake. The project is situated in South Somerset within a listed park and AONB, containing one of the best-preserved eighteenth-century aviaries in the country. The site masterplan, orientation, scale, and material composition have all been considered against the physical context of the historic estate and its surrounding landscape and views.

The plan is conceived as an aggregation of six straight-sided forms, arranged orthogonally around a central hallway. Pockets of ground are drawn into the body of the house by virtue of the building’s volumetric arrangement.

The form of the house is strongly influenced by the existing Georgian lodge’s physical composition – an imposing, stone square volume with deeply recessed window openings, a heavy base, and stepped walls which respond to the changing site topography.

Sand and stone aggregates will be procured from local Somerset quarries as constituent ingredients for the house facade, as a way of imbuing the building with a tone and texture redolent of the ground.
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Private client/c7M
Model 1: Mass of jesmonite, sanded to expose aggregates.
Model 2: Facade emulation cast with various stone aggregates.
Model 3: Cardboard working interior model.
Model 4: Greyboard, plaster and seaweed site model.