-
Architects: Ashworth Parkes Architects
- Area: 78 m²
- Year: 2015
-
Photographs:Justin Paget Photography
Text description provided by the architects. The project is a collection of new ‘agricultural’ style buildings at the threshold between the formal garden of the main house and meadow beyond in a small Northamptonshire village.
The brief asked for the demolition of an existing garage, a garden store and the remains of an old piggery. In their place our clients asked for a ‘Studio’ building’ with catering facilities and a bathroom, where our clients might ‘go away’ for the weekend, a garden storage building with room for an office at one end, a carport and a greenhouse.
Taking the original piggery walls as a cue, we created a series of new walls of various heights and orientations in the local coursed limestone from which the main house is constructed and that is so prevalent in Warmington and other Northamptonshire villages.
The new buildings emerge from, sail over or hang off these walls. Using a limited palette of unadorned ‘agricultural’ materials in a variety of different ways, sawn larch timber, (vertical random width cladding, oversized shingles and framing to the carport planted roof) corrugated aluminium and Cor10 steel, we have tried to create a relaxed informality between the buildings as if they have accreted themselves into the site and onto the walls over a period of time as needs required.
Internally in the studio we have repeated the random width vertical cladding on the outside, though this time it is planed and treated with a lye and a wax finish to maintain its’ colour. It is butt jointed to allow the timber to move and natural cracks and undulations to appear across the boards.
