Abigail Hopkins and Amir Sanei are not only architects, but also children of architects and grew up in houses that were built by their parents. The idea of designing your own home always seemed to do a natural thing. “For an architect, there is always a desire to build your own home, it is so personal,” says Sanei. “You want to be able to shape your life examinations – but building a house is also a bit of a manifest.”
Hopkins lived in a refined steel and glass house in 1976 that Patty and Michael Hopkins designed in North London – and which is now a listed building. It led to her first conscious architectural decision. “The only partitions between our bedrooms were Venetian blinds. When we were old enough, we insisted on the right walls,” she recalls. Her parents built the Portcullis House office block for MPs. A stand on Lord's Cricket Ground; The new Opera House of Glyndebourne – and your own headquarters of the FT, Bracken House, redesigned under much more. Sanis father, who practiced and taught architecture in Tehran, designed her house on the Caspian Sea.
At first, Hopkins and Sanei assumed that a new house in themselves would be impossible in one of the protected British protected areas with a view of the broad mouth of the Alde River in Suffolk in Suffolk. Her first idea was to replace a dilapidated lodge on the property that they had shared on Hopkins' both siblings and parents for 15 years. When they started with the process, it was proposed that a change application from John Gummer in 1997 to cover new buildings in the country could offer a better alternative.
Gummer, now Lord Deben, was the environmental secretary of the last government of John Major. After the change has addressed the imperative need to accept agricultural workers, he adds: “An isolated new house in the country can also be exceptionally justified if it is clearly of the highest quality, in terms of architecture and its landscape design, it is really excellent and would significantly improve its immediate surroundings and its broad surroundings.” It is a high bar to clarify and one that may be even more difficult to define. The local authority in Woodbridge was convincing that its design was qualified, took Hopkins and Sanei for three years.
Gummer tried to keep the tradition of the country house alive. He described it as “one of Britain's major contributions to art and architecture”. At that time it was a controversial idea; A planning consultant even described it as a “elitist”, which indicates that it could be a “gap for a millionaire”. The conservatives were out of office before a single application could be taken into account the new legislation. But it was taken over by their architect -friendly successors of the workers, who presented it as a test bed for the new thinking about the structure and planning as a nostalgic relapse.
New Lodge, as Hopkins and Saneis Haus is called, certainly does not look the traditional idea of a stately home. Carefully on a property created in the 19th century, which would form a distant satellite for a large house that would appreciate Gummer (although its neo-Georgian facades are a product of the 1950s, when the original Victorian house was strongly redesigned by Raymond Erith, perhaps the most injured classic from Great Britain). It was expressly developed to support the way of life, sails and long walks outdoors who had enjoyed Hopkins and Sanei, their five children and an elegant couple of Whippets when they lived in the appendix to the main house. Each family member has its own space, which is connected to an extensive common living area through an outdoor courtyard. “We had a special way of life here, and the new house enables us to live here as we had done,” explains Hopkins.
“We were very aware of the course of time and the generations. We wanted to ensure that the house as a house can develop in several ways. This is not only a building, but also a home for the future,” says Hopkins.
The guiding principle was to update the historical pattern of rural life, which was anchored by large houses with networks of small working farms in the distance. Each farm usually had a farmhouse, a collection of barns, stable, wagon scales and a grain that was around a courtyard. Hopkins and Sanei used this as a starting point for what they call “house”. It also consists of a group of different parts, but it looks outwards or “extroverted” and not from an “introverted” farm, as they express it to use an extraordinary environment.
Divided into four wings, everyone uses a completely different architectural language. “There were some members of the planning committee who were convinced that we tried to pull a quick and build four houses,” says Sanei.
The common living space in the south has completely glazed walls that are protected under a steep roof and look at the river. It was worked by David Rackham, the 14th generation of his family, with Reed from the local Dunwich and Walberswick Reed beds. It was a careful process in which Rackham lasted six months and worked with just one assistant. Thatch ensures a roof with excellent insulating properties and projects over the fully glazed walls to protect them. In winter the space is heated by the sun; In summer, the walls open for natural ventilation. The roof is carried on a structure that is reduced to the steel network of a spider and shocked a shadow made of Suffolk, which is shocked.
Suffolk has more than picturesque villages and medieval church towers. It is also a place of mysterious fragments of military archeology such as the coastal hearing stations of the Second World War in Bawdsey and Orford Ness, the pill boxes and weapon inlays that were built to defend the area, and the new agricultural colloquial language of corrugated sheet. Traces of these local influences in the New Lodge make it a kind of architectural collage.
The supply companies and boilers are placed in a hangar-like space under cleverly cut corrugated iron steel in the north, such as a Savile Row version of a Nissenhütte. The sleep quarters for the five children are in the east wing. Each room has its own bathroom and learning room and is connected to insulation by a GLA conservatory corridor. Hopkins and Saneil compare its unpaid chipboard surfaces with the aesthetics of a habitable stable scales or greenhouses. But it is more convenient than that sounds. Photovoltaic cells and the Solar hot water collector on the roof electricity back into the national network.
Hopkins and Sanei have their bedroom and a studio in the west wing. The studio is a metal structure that confesses Sanei, was inspired by a moonlander. It is located on the top of your brick bed and is reached by a particularly elegant, folded steel staircase on the outside of the building. The steel was produced in Aldeburgh by another family company founded by Dennis Pegg's great -grandfather, who was a blacksmith and farrier. Pegg specializes in precision technology and was responsible for making the Aldeburgh “Jakobsmussel”: artist Maggi Hambling Hommage to composer Benjamin Britten.
“I would not say that the children were treated as if they were the client,” recalls Hopkins. Nevertheless, there were “drawings and models that they could see and they helped to clarify the website. We saw how they enjoyed their earlier home here. [living in distinct areas] Is the second nature for her, we knew it would work. There was a discussion with our youngest about a tunnel from the studio to the bedroom, but as deceased teenagers, they were happy not to be too close to us. ”
Requesting an architect to do something open and extraordinary could be to invite him to fall into the prerequisite and self -confidence. New Lodge is a much more thoughtful house than that. It is full of ideas about sustainability, design and planning, which are applicable elsewhere and are at the same time closely tailored to a specific location and a certain lifestyle.
Deyan Sudjic is an emeritus director of the Design Museum in London
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