Lege

The triangular geometry of the plot set the terms for this family house. Rather than resist the awkward angle, the architecture absorbs it: the plan steps inward in a series of recesses, an indented figure that follows the boundary lines and, in doing so, organises the dwelling into three distinct territories — one for the children, one for the parents, and a shared collective space held between them.

This tripartite logic is made legible in the building itself. Load-bearing cross-walls of board-formed concrete, left raw, mark the seams between the three zones while lending the volumes their thermal mass. The walls do more than divide; they register the structural and environmental thinking of the house in a single gesture, the grain of the formwork kept visible as a record of how the material was made.

There is a quieter narrative beneath the finished building, one of intentions only partly realised. The cross-walls were conceived in rammed earth — a geo-sourced, low-carbon material the architect argued for — but the clients were not persuaded, and the masonry façades the project nearly received were avoided only at the last moment. Virtuous architecture carries a cost that cannot always be met, and the house is honest about the negotiations that shaped it.

What survived those negotiations is timber. Brought in at the final stage, its materiality settles the single-storey, generously glazed house into the surrounding pinewood, dissolving the boundary between the built form and the trees. The house sits low and open to its setting, less an object placed in the landscape than a structure that has come to rest within it.