A Woodland Home Near Brighton
House of Solitude is a new woodland home in East Sussex, near Brighton.
Visiting the site for the first time, I left the main road behind. A narrow track disappeared into woodland and within minutes the road noise had gone. The light changed beneath the tree canopy and it became cooler. You could spend a lifetime in here watching the insects and brimstone butterflies and never be seen.
I looked around again with the team. It was a secret woodland. It was now clear why our clients had fallen in love with this place.
The Grand Old Oak
Adjacent to where I was standing, I discovered a clearing. It felt like an outdoor room and I moved towards it. Just before I ducked under the leaves, I realised the clearing had been made by the crown of a giant oak.
Its trunk told me it was old, really old.
We felt like speaking in hushed tones around it. Old things exposed to time have that effect, like old libraries and churchyards. After a little research back in the studio, we discovered that this oak was already growing when the American Constitution was being written. Imagine that. It has watched centuries of storms and sun drenched days. It will go on presiding over this site long after we are all gone.
To live beneath it, next to it, is to live with something that has outlasted nations. That single realisation reoriented our approach. The oak would provide the next chapter in our clients’ story. The tree quite rightly became the shared heart of the site. Every project has a centre. Our work is to find it.
Architecture sometimes falls forward when you stand back and observe the world. Stop trying to design. Patience is hard work because it can feel like no work at all. But something continues in the background and occasionally allows you to see what was already there in plain sight.
A few days later, research in the studio revealed something else. Most oaks do not stand alone. They, like our clients, form part of a family. We missed this on our first visit.
We now know the main oak is the eldest of a family of oaks that will outlive us all. The children were just hiding from us in plain sight.
Looking Ahead
House of Solitude explored here joins a body of current work along the south coast of England.
Singularity, a substantial residence in Lymington, distils home back to its essentials. Our clients’ international journey and the growth of their business from local to global sit behind a home intended as a retreat. Fire, water, earth. Grounded.
Sea House, on the Kent coast, tests the boundary between shelter and exposure on one of our steepest sites yet. A story of family, gathering and a life of mathematics.
The oak at House of Solitude. The Lymington fire. The Kent sea coast.
Different sites, contexts, and human stories.
Every project must begin again.
—