The Lodge is a proposal for an exceptional modern house located in a bucolic setting on the edge of London. The house will provide energy-efficient, generous and flexible family accommodation—designed to take full advantage of it’s unique site with a sensitive approach in form, massing and materiality, to the landscape in which it sits - minimising disruption of the wooded grounds. 

Responding to the historic maps of the site, The Lodge is conceived as a series of stacking and interlocking volumes set within and around intimate walled courtyards, creating fluid transition between in side and out. Viewed from beyond the site boundary, the first floor, with limited fenestration, is the only obviously inhabited space, as the ground floor is presented as garden walls over which this massing projects. Carefully orchestrated apertures within the ‘garden walls’ are not visible unless within the entrance courtyard. At ground floor, the L-shaped plan ensures that all spaces have a relationship with the garden and landscape beyond, and creates a slow reveal of the beautiful natural gardens to the North. Internal axes set up meaningful connections with the wooded grounds and surrounding landscape via perforated boundary conditions to the West. 

The materiality of the building is simple, elegant and robust. The intention is to utilise a minimal and high-quality palette of materials which respond to the modernity of the proposal, and compliment, while contrast the ephemeral landscape surrounding the house. A masonry facade with fair-faced concrete ring beams is softened by oak fenestration and planted wild-flower roofs. Careful specification of all construction materials will create an ecologically clean house with minimal synthetic materials, and a fabric-first ‘towards passivhaus’ approach.

The aim is to create a striking yet discrete addition to the semi-rural context; a house with an enhanced connectivity between living and the landscape. For its setting, with no near neighbours, the architectural language can afford to be ambitious and less referential. The local area has a history of integrating fine examples of modern architecture into its leafy context—an approach to which this proposal aspires.