How architect duo Surman Weston created a striking family home – complete with a greenhouse on the roofA striking red-brick cube stands on a backstreet corner in Peckham, south London, its walls appearing to dissolve as they rise towards the top, where trailing plants spill through the brickwork, their dangling foliage giving it the air of an overgrown ruin.Part monolithic block, part gossamer screen, this arresting house is the work of Surman Weston, a pair of young architects who, tired of answering to clients and contractors, decided to design and build this experimental home themselves.“We always had a dream of doing a project without a client, and without handing everything over to the builders,” says Percy Weston, who lives in the house with his partner and three-year-old son (although the house is jointly owned with his fellow architect, Tom Surman). “We wanted to be able to decide things on site and experiment live as we went along,” says Weston. “So we put all our life savings, and the money from our 10 years of practice, into giving it a go.”The gamble has paid off. The result is a house where every detail has been lovingly crafted in a way that would have been all but impossible – or prohibitively expensive – if done by a regular builder. Downstairs, exposed ceiling joists have been scarf-jointed, a traditional technique that uses wedges of timber, rather than bolts or screws, to join shorter lengths together. They sit on top of a big beam of larch, the log’s surface left scraped and exposed, as if hauled in fresh from the Devon woodland where it was sourced. Screw holes for the noggins (the pieces of wood between the joists) have been filled with little projecting dowels, with the precision of Japanese carpentry. Continue reading…
Source : theguardian.com
Read more…‘We always dreamed of building our own house – so we did’
