Response to Knott

Here is the opening of our response to Knott, with the south elevation as proposed below.  Is it just us, or does it look like a prison?  Are we just being picky?

Since we met earlier this week we’ve had some time to consider the design you presented.  Although we said that we would dedicate some time to costings before responding substantively, we have come to the conclusion that the design as presented is ill-conceived and not heading in the right direction for us, and we therefore require rethought plans.  

Our main concerns are two-fold.  Firstly, we required the design to make “the best use of light and space”.  Our primary reason for coming to you was that off-the-shelf providers did not seem to be able to cater for a long, narrow plot, orientated as it is.  A key challenge, therefore, was how best to get light into the heart of the house.

However, you have presented a two-storey house with virtually no glazing in the south elevation, indeed less than the bungalow it is replacing. We stated that we wished to build an energy efficient house – we do not believe this can be achieved most successfully with so few windows in the south aspect to allow for solar gain.  Also, two rooms – the study and open plan landing - are utterly devoid of natural light.  Most of all, we were surprised that you have kept the garage on the south side of the property.  We could understand this if the rationale was to provide a long sloping roof into which rooflights could be placed providing light, but without overlooking neighbours (a strategy we would be happy with), but this clearly is not the thinking.

 
Overall, we feel the layout of the house as currently drawn would not meet our requirements and is a worsening, rather than improvement, from the draft floorplan we gave you as part of our briefing pack in July.  This is a great disappointment. 

Secondly, and perhaps the style of the drawing is to blame, but the design appears too similar to the 1970s brick-built houses common locally with an offset vertical stretch of tiles instead of your metal sheet.  Unless you can provide an alternative means of presenting the design, this looks bland and boring and is not a design we would wish to invest in.  We appreciate the Council may have a conservative approach to style and design of the new dwelling but two Council officers have verbally confirmed that a more contemporary design, if good quality, may be possible.  We do wonder whether you have taken the overall context of XXXXX Lane into account as the current design seems to just deliver a two storey version, slightly updated, of the current bungalow.

On a more positive note, despite initial reservations, we are happy with the concept of dropping the front third of the house to decrease the apparent massing when viewed from the road.

And then we went on with particular, specific issues, some of which did appear to be basic architectural howlers, like positioning the stairs so all the cold air from outside rushes straight to the upper floor when it could be simply reversed.  Then again, many Victorian houses have just the same fault and they invented just about everything and painted the world pink (hello to all our readers in the Empire).

We still think we've got the right architect (possibly because we don't want to start again?), but the next few weeks will prove us right or wrong...