Leeway
A sustainable new 4-bedroom family home and art studio for a practicing artist in the town of Wivenhoe, Essex.
The riverside town of Wivenhoe is characterised by the pitched roof form, extruded, combined and extended incrementally to create a complex but rich townscape. In reference to this, the house is conceived as a family of three similar forms with pitched roofs: the house, the garage and the art studio.
The house is arranged as an ‘L’, giving the principal rooms a long view across the landscape towards the Colne estuary. The composition of the three forms creates an entrance courtyard, and two terraces connect the interior of the house to the landscape beyond: simple spaces for sitting, eating, gathering amongst the landscape.
Taking cues from the vernacular boat-yard buildings that typify the East Anglian coast, the house is clad in black-stained timber boards, a standing-seam zinc roof, and a plinth of Essex red brick.
The house has been designed and built following Passivhaus principles that allow it to forego a conventional heating system. It is constructed from a super-insulated, airtight timber frame filled with blown cellulose fibres, and is mechanically ventilated with an MVHR system. A solar PV array on the roof powers the house via a battery store, provides hot water via a phase-change water heater, and powers an air-source heat pump that provides heating and cooling when required. Retractable external venetian blinds have been carefully built into the window reveals to provide solar shading across the south-facing façade.
The house sits at the top of a historic orchard, falling away towards a small brook, and the river estuary to the South. A long-term landscaping plan sees the existing ‘wild’ quality of the site retained an enhanced, reinforcing the features that define its character. This includes planting more trees to re-establish the orchard, densifying the tree cover at the boundaries of the site, and planting a native wildflower meadow across the site that will enhance the existing biodiversity and provide habitats for native species. Structured perennial planting will be introduced around the house, inspired by the local work of Beth Chatto.
