Corran House

The site is a shelf of rock above a west-facing shore, with weather that arrives without much warning and a planning context that is understandably conservative about anything visible from the water.

The clients are a family of two who become a family of nine at Christmas. Designing for the average would have produced a house that is wrong all year.

Three volumes, three thermostats

So the house is three linked timber volumes on a single plinth. The middle one — kitchen, hearth, one bedroom — is the year-round house and can run on its own. The two flanking volumes hold the additional bedrooms and a workroom, and each can be dropped to a maintenance temperature and shut off at a single valve.

For most of the year the clients heat about ninety square metres. At Christmas they heat all of it. The alternative, a single well-insulated box, would have been simpler to build and considerably more expensive to run for eleven months of every year.

Facing the weather

Orientation was decided by wind rather than view, which is not the instinct on a site like this. The prevailing south-westerlies are strong enough that a glazed elevation facing them would have been an endless maintenance argument, so the long glazing faces north-west and the south-west elevation is largely closed, with deep reveals in larch that has been left to silver.

The view is still there. You just arrive at it obliquely, through the plan, rather than having it handed to you at the front door.

Getting materials to site

Every component had to cross on a ferry with a weight limit and then travel four miles of single-track road. That constraint did more to shape the construction than any design decision: closed-panel timber cassettes, sized to the trailer, craned into place in nine days.

On a site like this, the buildable option and the sustainable option turn out to be the same option.