Returning from living in crowded, high energy Hong Kong, a young family asked Alan Higgs Architects to design them a new home in leafy, calm Surrey. The result is a new 600 square meter house that also provides a contrast: externally it responds to its vernacular streetscape but inside contains flowing, modern spaces that capture the sun and views and frame internal vistas. The setting of the house is a charming road beside a quintessentially English cricket ground.
The architectural context is varied, but the design flowed from the idealised domesticity of surrounding 1930s villas – gable roof forms, prominent chimneys, white walls, picturesque compositions. The new house design develops this vernacular through simplification and strengthening – it is not pastiche but it has a dialogue with its neighbours. Materials build on this; walls are bagged and painted brickwork, loggias are stone clad and grey metalwork provides definition. The site was formerly occupied by an undistinguished house but the potential was in the plot. It is a wedge shape – narrow facing the street and fanning out asymmetrically at the rear where the south-facing orientation captures the sun.
Established hedges and trees enclose a private, green, self-contained domain. This strongly influenced the planning. There are two parallel north-south axes. The first extends from the entrance through a long circulation gallery. This contains a fine steel and timber staircase against panelled walls that rise through three levels. Its other wall and floor finishes are continuations from those outside. The second shifts to centre on the rear garden, through the pavilion-like family living room.
The form follows these functions, with the high gabled, relatively solid main block in counterpoint to the low glass-walled and top-lit pavilion. The spaces are elegant with a careful balance between openness and enclosure and between public and more private zones. There are three main living rooms, a study, six bedrooms, internal garage. The house is ventilated by a heat-recovery system that warms air via underground ducts before it enters the building.
