Oak Lane House

The house is legible as a double layer of volumes. The ground-floor façade is clad in hand-laid knapped flints, laid over 100mm-thick, medium-density blockwork walls. The first floor façade is clad in 144mm strips of European larch, painted black. These two layers have been broken down into smaller volumes and in places pulled out of direct alignment.

Passing towards the kitchen, the glazing on the southern side of the sitting room and on the eastern side of the kitchen can be withdrawn fully and recessed in either wall. Thanks to a long truss there is no column, so the whole of the centre of the house facing the sun is potentially open. Off this room, which acts as the hearth of the building, there are more living spaces, guest bedrooms and offices, which are more private.

On the upper floor in particular the windows are addressed to the corners, rather than the centre: it is an approach that is enhanced by the way in which recessed grey steel finishes mark the junction of the flint-clad walls. Windows on the first floor are floor-to-ceiling and can slide to fully recess into pockets behind the timber cladding.

In order to achieve the apparently simple aesthetic of black timber boxes shifting forwards and backwards on top a flint base, a strict datum line running around the entire building was established with the detailing of a range of PPC aluminium cappings. Imagined as a subtle, simple line dividing the two floors of the house, the capping detail varies, depending on whether the timber sits directly above the flint, cantilevers past the line of the flint, or whether the flint projects past the timber, leaving a single-storey flint box.