Inside The Secluded Seaside Home Of Giles And Sarah-Jane Miller

When you are reconnecting with family and friends in the space, you are also reconnecting with nature and it is a very visceral feeling. We've always been interested in how the studio's artistic approach might manifest itself in a building you can live in. The main, I suppose, overriding themes that we're interested in are the control and celebration of light and also a big consideration for the context of each project. It's been interesting to come to a plot that's just a canopy of trees. I think we felt that you couldn't have something so busy visually. We wanted to allow the outside, the trees and the canopy of the trees to become that texture and so we were creating a kind of viewpoint really rather than a piece of work itself. The trees become probably the prominent characteristic of the experience of being in the building. There's a lot of the studio's work dotted around the house but otherwise we wanted to keep the interior simple and bring in a lot of natural materials. The layout is such that on the ground floor you've got this sort of central core section and then the building cantilevers out so you've got a very open walkway around the perimeter. Although it's open plan there are zones to it so you can feel at one with everyone but also quite separate. It's quite a small footprint but there is a sense of space and then upstairs it's a lot more private. Every room is sort of bathed in light. Because of the nature of the project and how experimental it is we want as many people to use it as possible. The house was sort of built to be a retreat, a place for sanctuary and happiness. It is a space for family and friends to come and share really lovely moments. I think it's a bit of a contradiction for us to have a plot that's so close to the sea and we're a hundred meters back from the cliff edge here and yet rather than kind of opening ourselves up to the view we're kind of hunkered down in the middle of a kind of glade of trees. But I think you do have that feeling still that the sea is right there. You can hear it and you can almost smell it and it does change how you feel I think being by the coast. What will be very exciting going forward is the addition of the kinetic facade, the kind of artistic sculpture that's going to be added to the building. The next stage will come once it's been lived in and once we've learnt from it and had feedback. The house will become more intuitive with the addition of the facade. It will be even more experiential to be in the space. You'll be able to choose where your window is that day or your door is and open it up when the sun is shining. We do feel like there's more function, more design, more development, more that we want to put into the building rather than the kind of experiment that we're undertaking here. The future for Woven is exciting because it's going to become more at one with its surroundings.