A Little Film of the Love Shack!

We won a RIBA award!

A rather belated Mexican wave for us - the Shack won one of the 5 regional (NW) awards granted by the Royal Institute of British Architects. It's the only domestic house on the list, and has also been shortlisted for the prestigious Manser Medal.
Even better, our other local project by Sutherland Hussey Architects at Lawson Park - also won a RIBA - 2 out of 5 ain't bad for Adam and his brother, our architect, Charlie ;-)

Race-y chair

We have just bought the Shack a very nice present in the form of a classic chair and footstool by British designer Ernest Race - the Heron (archive photo on left), a classic which was in production until 1961. Unlike the photo, ours has an ingenious additional neck cushion suspended from a lead-weighted ' strap' that goes over the top of the chair. And boy is it comfy.....
For lots of lovely similar-era seating you might like this site....

RIBA!

Apparently the Shack has been entered for the 2011 RIBA Awards - wish it luck! I see one of the criteria for the judging is 'delight'. We've definitely got that covered.

Shop Revival

The local shop,Sawrey Stores, has re-opened, hurrah.
Not for very long now that it's winter, but the new folk seem very nice. Long may it survive.

Visitors of all kinds

Very pleased to say that both Cumbria Green Build Festival tours yesterday were fully booked and we welcomed a wide-ranging group of would-be self-builders, professionals and young architecture fans.
To top off the good times we say our red squirrel in the garden this morning, for the first time in over a year!

Come & Visit Us

...As part of the Cumbria Green Build Festival, on Sept. 16th 2010
Full info here on the free event
PS we are also in Grand Designs magazine this month...

Some local 'charm'

There I was lamenting the sudden closure of the Sawrey Stores, a valiant village shop that for several years supplied us with milk, odds and ends on our way to and from the Shack.....
I admired the lady who ran it and advised all our guests to use the shop rather than the Hawkshead alternatives nearby.

And then I happened across her last blog entry, which offers no explanation for the closure but does include a rather sarcastic snipe at the Shack and ourselves!

"Funny how there was no mention of their plans to let it out, not sure what the council planners might think, especially as there is such a shortage of affordable housing in this area"

Sadly the blogger has disabled comments and so we're unable to respond directly to her, so I'll just put her right on a few things here instead:

In our first planning application we offered to restrict the occupancy to local-only, as we too have concerns about affordable housing and were prepared to put our money where our mouth was: the LDNPA rejected this restriction

Incredibly, some of the most vociferous local objections to our proposed plans for the Shack were that - I quote - "they plan to live in the house instead of it being used as a holiday let"!
These objections came from 'locals' who for some reason sought to maintain the very situation that has probably contributed to the closure of the Sawrey Stores - i.e. few permanent residents

We finally got the Shack's planning permission after 5 long hard and expensive years of battling - understandably some of our domestic circumstances shifted in the meantime and we in the end lived in the Shack for 6 months

We are now obliged to live in a nearby tied house linked to one of our jobs - this is a very common situation here in the Lakes. The Shack remains our only owned home and one that we use and cherish a great deal

I don't need to tell anyone reading this that starting a new-build in a recession means making a few harsh decisions about how to keep your head above water - renting the house out sometimes being one of them

We dedicated a sizable portion of the Shack's building budget to using local suppliers and companies (often at much greater expense than available alternatives) , and therefore feel that the project supported the local economy as much as possible
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The shopkeeper's comments of course show how complex a rural, tourist-driven economy is, and also - sadly - that we make assumptions about our neighbours' circumstances based on presumed greed and dishonesty. This isn't unrelated - the seasonal 'boom and bust' of the tourism calendar means that quality, ethics and consistency are relegated in favour of whatever-it-takes-to-make-a-quick-buck (before my month of recovery in the Maldives) , and the sheer exhaustion of customer service at the cliff-face of visitors in their thousands takes its toll on people's faith in human nature.

We struggled a great deal with the principles of letting out the Shack and I used to think that in an ideal world of course we'd be rich enough to keep the place entirely for ourselves. But now, after 6 months of guests, I've now changed my position as I have been won over by the appreciation of our visitors. After the pain of the planning and build it's extremely gratifying to hear feedback on how the design of the house works for people, what makes it special and how the experience of staying at the Shack can be healing, cathartic, eye-opening.

Importantly for us, the Shack also works as an educational experience - few visitors have had the opportunity to stay in a self-build contemporary building or an eco-building in this country - and with the rise of Grand Designs et al there is a huge curiosity to experience this first hand and to take some of that experience onwards into one's own life.
It's very exciting to think that the Shack can inspire more great architecture, and that our hospitality is part of that.

Media attention

In swift succession (ah, the rigour of journalism) we have featured in both Wallpaper* and the Guardian recently as one of "the best cabins in the world", the latter causing a temporary suspension of our website due to traffic volume!
http://www.wallpaper.com/cabinclass
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/gallery/2009/aug/04/best-cabins-in-the-world?picture=351182492

Happy Campers

Well it's hat-eating time for me.
I would be the last person to expect that renting our hardwon self-build to complete strangers would be a rewarding and life-affirming experience - but I can say that it really is!
Guests we've had so far have been just unbelievably appreciative and have treated the house like royalty. It's fascinating to read the visitor's book - it seems most people arrive expecting to get out and about a lot, but then they are so relaxed by the house that they rarely manage to get onto a fell or into their cars until they reluctantly leave.
It's a tribute to Charlie the architect's skill in creating such an oasis - but also very amusing when I remember the screaming hab dabs (actually, what are they?) that both Adam and I let rip with at regular intervals during the build. What a contrast to the now Zen-like calm that pervades the place and makes it so unique.

Honey, I just cut the house open

Try as we might we couldn't get a soul locally to take on the install of our stove in our wooden house. Calls were not returned, even after visits to inspect the matter, heads were scratched etc etc. This is how it came to pass that, after very very detailed communications between architect and local building control officer, Adam had to do the job himself.
From his silence (DIY round here is usually wildly swear-y), I could tell that ( though we had concise instructions on how to do this) he was rather worried.

To save space the stove is a Eurostove inset model, with its firebox in effect 'outside' the house in the storage recess under the big panoramic window. The twin falled flue therefore passes up through the cladding outside the window, upwards through the 'eaves' of the flat roof and out the top of the house (the flue isn't in in this pic). I have never seen any other stove installed this way, not had anyone else we spoke to about it! Hence Mr Building Control coming out to get his head round it and ours.

So effectively we had to cut out the SIPS panels under the window for the stove, loadbear onto temp. structures at either side, add an agroprop below the stove on the base of the building, and pray. I had a vision of the house turning 'V-shaped' and caving in, thankfully unfulfilled. Between the actual stove and the building (see diagram) there is a complex layering of things like vermiculite board, that I didnt know existed.

The stove sits on a bespoke cast concrete hearth made for us (and better still, delivered up the hill by hand) by the excellent Lancaster Cast Stone (also now doing a simple surround for us) (www.lcs-uk.co.uk)
And now, we have had the fire on, its gorgeous, and save for maybe adding a bit more chimney onto our roof for better draw, it all seems to have worked.

Bank Holiday pause for enjoyment

My sister and her family visit this weekend, the first in my family to see our endeavours since the site was a mouldy old log cabin on the hillside. It's given me an incentive to have a good clear up in the spring sunshine and even take a moment to enjoy the place. The light through the fresh leaves is astonishing, very Japanese, I could get quite emotional....

Over and out - I have to start grouting again.

Pale green?

Here's an interesting feature on the slightly controversial green credentials of Corian, a material we've used in our kitchen here both as a surface and a splashback.

Bedroom green roof install

Our bedroom - the smallest and least visible of the two green roofs on the site - is about 3.5 x 4.5 metres in size, and for this green roof we used 9 x 100litre bags of lightweight vermiculite mixed in situ (see pic!) with 8 x 35litre bags of sterilised loam topsoil. This gave us a soil depth of about 15cm.
This mix went on top of a large piece of woven membrane, in turn on top of a kind of black plastic eggbox in sheets which very simply lie on top of our butyl rubber flat roof.
I'm fascinated to see what the birds and wind bring in to this roof so I'll be not seeding it at all and monitoring what comes up - watch this space!

Cue Mother Nature

Amazing weather this Easter means we've got on with the green roofs here. For urban folks these are a tiny oasis in the overheated city, a little postage stamp of biodiversity in the concrete. Here its more about having a nice feeling of nature growing on all sides of your house, any maybe even breaking up the ruthless lines of modernist architecture ....
If I was going to live here full time I'd be building a vegetable plot or a chicken run. Ok, or maybe a freerange guinea pig run. But at the mo we're installing two extensive green roofs on both storeys of the house, each about 15cm deep.
I decided -as I'm a big gardener - to leave the smaller roof (on the bedroom) to colonise naturally over time with windblown / animal-carried seed. The large one -visible from the bedroom - will need more 'real cultivation'.

Fellow Love Shackers

Of course this is the REAL Love Shack but one of our summer guests just sent me this story of a couple who - like us - struggled to get their local Council to allow the naming of their house:

LONDON, April 5 (UPI) -- Artist Simon Cassini says he and his wife Sheba were allowed to officially name their London home Love Shack thanks to a backyard barbecue.
Cassini, 51, said while the Richmond Council had concerns the name Love Shack would mislead emergency workers, firefighters easily located their home while responding to a call of a possible backyard fire, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

"Richmond Council would not let us change the name of our house because in the event of an incident involving the emergency services, they would not know which house to go to," Cassini said.

Read the whole story here.

Hollywood Hills stylee

Decking, decking everywhere

We don't like commercially available decking, easy and cheap though it may be.



















At Lawson Park we designed and built a long boardwalk last summer, of this rough-planed '2 by 1' green larch and so far it's stayed reasonably unslippy and has aged gracefully. So we have decided to use it on the walkway and decks here too, brad-nailed with our lovely new nailgun and setting each bit about 3mm apart for drainage and to add grip. It's a slow process with a certain rustic-ness from the timber's variability - occasionally pieces are narrow or warped and you kind of get used to working around these defects.

Below this carpet of decking pictured is a simple grid of joists and bracing made of larch and recycled timbers, with larch uprights driven directly into the ground. This approach was also approved by the local Planners as it protects the roots of the trees on site, arguably more than a lawn or gravel area would.

The nature of the timber gives scope for all sorts of patterning and we have frequent discussions about whether to 'chevron' the wood, to line it up with the house etc etc. As you can see here we think we'll offset it at an angle, quite Japanese-y. I'm thinking of dropping the odd potted tree into the surface too - maybe an acer or similiar.

Despite the many interior jobs left to do we have taken advantage of any recent sunny day to get on with this external decking as when done, it will offer us a much-needed 'clean' and flat space on which to do everything from painting the odd bit of wood, brushing the cats, Tai Chi (when Nina's next here), or God forbid, relaxing......

Mmmmm - Corian

Regular readers will have endured our search for the perfect kitchen surface along with us, and the end result is shelling out a slightly embarrasing sum for this gorgeous Corian worktop in 'Bone'. It's looks a bit like that roll-out icing you can buy, and has the advantage of a seamless sunk-in sink and lovely details like this upstanding edge pictured - which we designed to join up with the cedar trim we're using throughout the house. It's very warm to touch and - Adam tells me - makes for a very nice wiping experience too.
(Actually I did wipe it - for the picture...)
PS The uncluttered but still cute hob kettle behind is called Nio, by designer Oliver Hemming

Stairs - are they rocket science?

I've mentioned the hell of our house's 3 staircases on this blog before....I know thats a lot of steps for a one bedroom house but if you want views you need to get up high! I lost count of the number of builder conversations about the steps, I nearly had to ban it at one stage from discussion and would have if it wasnt such a fundamental part of getting on with things (have you ever tried accessing 3 floors with no stairs? It's...interesting, and hard on the knees)

Basically 2 builders we were using disagreed on how to construct them and this is where the problems start. This set pictured are the main ones into the open plan living room, and were made mainly in a workshop, by laminating the oak floor tiles to treads and risers of the structure before joining them and positioning them in situ. The issues started with warping once brought in to the house, but with a lot of wood you can live with it, and when our backs were turned one day they seemed to go in ok.
Or so we thought.

We immediately noticed how cold the house was around the stair area, despite our builder reassuring us that they had insulated around them as they went. Some weeks later we started to notice worrying 'flex' and gaps and realised that the booked-in flooring contractor (who needed to floor up to the steps and do all the sanding / varnishing) was about to start and we had a big problem on our hands.
Aforementioned builder eventually told us he couldnt come back to examine the problems in time, so Adam opened them up at the weekend to find all this gubbins in the picture. Not only is there a laughably inept and wobbly triangular 'support' (thats where all the screws are hanging out) there was almost nothing actually holding the tread and riser together at the joint. No wonder it was flexing. Now I'm no builder but even I can see that this job is what my dad might call 'a bugger's muddle' - I can only guess the builders never imagined we'd go to the lengths of digging it all up and would settle for their effort.

After much swearing Adam spent a weekend reconstructing the innards but his neccessary butchery sadly had consequences as regards the finish of them and we will probably have to get them re-filled sanded and varnished in the near future.

Oh, and after that we poured over 100litres of vermiculite in, the whole area warmed up nicely.

So the moral of the story? Well, maybe build bungalows?