Courtyard HouseCourtyard House

Instead the house is arranged as a closed perimeter with a courtyard cut through its centre. The rooms look inward, into still air and reflected light, and the view is released only twice: once on arrival, and once from the long room at the western end.

Walls are in-situ concrete cast against sawn boards, left as struck. Floors are the same concrete, ground and sealed. The only other materials are oak, for everything that is touched, and blackened steel for the openings.

The courtyard is not a garden. It is a room without a roof — the same floor level, the same wall finish, the same detail at the base. Crossing into it is a change of light, not a change of building.

Every opening in the perimeter wall is the same width. The variation in the house comes from what those openings frame, not from the openings themselves.

The starting drawing was a section, not a plan: a solid mass with a void cut vertically through it, and the question of what happens at the four edges of that void.

The plan followed from the section. Rooms are ranged around the courtyard in a single loop, so the house is walked as a circuit rather than as a corridor with doors off it.