Sharing Ideas with The Baylight Fellowship
Alex shares what happened on the day that we joined in with our client Charlie Benyon of Benyon Properties.
The first stop was the Span house development at Cedar Grove, Taplow.
A collection of twenty four L shaped houses from 1966 designed by Eric Lyons and landscaped by Ivor Cunningham. Residents explained how they are experimenting with different ways of retrofitting their homes with new insulation, tipple glazing and some attempts at replacing the original air system heating.
The next stop took it up a gear. Lyde End at Bledlow is a collection of six houses for local people, commissioned by Lord Carrington with Paul Collinge as project architect from Aldington and Craig. The houses were built between 1975-76.
What is the Baylight Fellowship?
It is a modular masterclass that comprises a series of day trips and residential workshops. Providing this generation’s most ambitious commissioners of new housing with the insight, knowledge and inspiration required to deliver outstanding homes, and unlock sustainable future value.
The day was organised by Laura Mark the Keeper of Walmer Yard and Director of the Baylight Foundation. The day’s guide was Merlin Fulcher of the Architect’s Journal and photographer for the day was Open City’s Director Phineas Harper.
The group included developers from private companies and from Community led trusts. There were architects at director level, year out stage and architects starting their own practices. Two visiting lectures joined from Ireland and we had furniture makers who had a special reason to join the 5th visit in the series.
The bus ride up to Hertfordshire provided the opportunity for the group to get to know each other a little.
The group speculated what once stood before. An old farm yard perhaps? A retrofit? It is neither...
It is entirely of one construction and one design but it feels timeless. The farm yard felling is created with a fragmented footprint and roofline. Windfall apples lying on the ground, the car park’s soft hogging (not tarmac) which gives blurred planted edges to the collection of low dark red brick walls.
The affordable houses are efficient, small and closely spaced. This bonds the houses with these sense of a collection of farm buildings rather than standalone houses, so often today’s developer norm.
For us at Mowat & Company, this feels very much like the completion winning scheme for Peabody that is currently on site at Morpeth road in Hackney.
For Charlie Benyon it was an opportunity to compare the size and layout with the emerging designs of the design shared courtyard in a scheme that we are working on together.
Merlin, Laura and Phineas left the best house ‘til last…
Peter Adlington’s house was designed and self-built in the late 1960s and finished in 1970.
It is one of three village houses (The Turn, Middle Turn, Turn End) in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.
Pictures don’t do this house justice. None of us were ready for the layered experience that the house gives in real life. A burst of torrential rain make the inside to outside flow hard to experience. It is hard to understand if it was the house or the rain that totally hushed the conversation, everyone was rendered speechless.
It is part greenhouse, part Museum of British craft, part traditional English garden wall, part white modernist masonry. The roof’s clay tiles could almost be from a rural Spanish village but the slatted timber clerestory windows owe more to contemporary Helskini suburbs.
Once inside the surprises continued.
The house appeared to draw on Scandinavian and Japanese inspired design. The dark timber slatted cladding has a style that would not be out of place on traditional a house in Kyoto. We were later surprised to find out that Peter had never been to Japan.
Someone asked where Peter got the specialist cedar beams. Peter explained they were the biggest standard joists that he could get from the builder’s merchant off the rack.
The master bed is made of concrete blockwork, looks directly at the dining table and out into the garden. Electrical switches are cut into rough concrete blockwork, The toilets don’t have seats. The doorhandles are wooden. The table is made from cheap sycamore that has grown beautifully smooth over the years of everyday use. Peter’s chair, designed by Charles Eames, is hacked with some rough carpentry to turn it into a rocking chair
This house amazed at every turn. It is simultaneously eclectic, in the varied associations that it makes but is the singular vision of Peter Aldington. It stands testament to this clarity of vision, that he and his wife Margret, have had to change very little in the 50 years that they have lived there. They got it right first time. It has worn and not worn out. Both things that we aim to achieve when we design places.
