Modern four bedroom family house in UK

The Welch House is located in Isle of Wight, UK. It was a project by The Manser Practice, the same ones that also designed a house for the same clients in Nevada. This time the clients wanted a modern family home with seaside views. They had few requirements. They wanted the house to have four bedrooms, a large open plan living area and they also wanted the cost to be as reasonable as possible.

The house that the clients requested was designed to replace a shack. It sits on a sloping site with unstable ground conditions. This definitely posed problems to the architects. However, the problem was easily solved. The team created a foundation deeply piled and retained with soil nails. They also designed a flat and stable platform and decided, together with the client, to create a simple house with a box-like structure.

Since the steel framed legs that the architects wanted to use proved to be too expensive, they used instead a compact tear shaped concrete tube. This way the area which contains the utility room and the shower room was created. On top of this volume a simple steel framed two storey box was placed. The box contains the entrance and the bedrooms on the ground floor and a study, the living area and the kitchen on the upper level. The building was designed with a physical footprint on the ground as small as possible. The house needed to appear to float within the trees. It resembles a polished black box and it was both economical to build and fun to design.{found on archdaily and pics by Morley Von Sternberg}.