A House Within A House: An Experimental New Housing Typology On the Banks of a Pristine Rural Lake

We purchased the lander in about 15 years ago and it was at a time when we were looking for you know a future spot in which to build a holiday home. Over the years we've camped and had family time here and it's given us a chance to get used to you know the climate and the landscape and time to think about a response. The concept was an exploration of an idea between inside and outside and indoor outdoor flow and about the creation of an in-between space that sort of captured the informality of camping on the site. So the idea is to have a house inside another house which creates these kind of three definitive zones. We've got the inside of the inside, we have the inside of the outside and then we also have outside the outside. One of the key parts of this outside space is to be able to operate and adapt it and so the large garage doors allow us to open them up and essentially turns the outside structure when it's fully open into a veranda space. It's also the main circulation space to get around from the inner house and we have a aircraft hangar style door on the end which you know bifolds up and out of the road. To differentiate the inner house and the outer house we on purposely made the inner structure all clad in timber which is a Baudot thermally modified timber and that's wrapped around the outside of the inner structure and also through all of the inside surfaces. The mezzanine space is really the connection with the original idea of camping and the sleeping spaces up there and have the ability to you know draw curtains around them which gives sort of varying degrees of privacy not too dissimilar to you know camping in a tent. The use of electricity as a renewable and sustainable source of energy made complete sense. The main heating and cooling system is a fully ducted heat recovery system that operates off a heat pump. The thermal chimney allows cross ventilation and heat build-up in the peak of the roof to escape out through the windows and hides all the heat pump plant. All of the ducting is hidden away and we just have nice discrete grills into each of the rooms and it means that you know when we turn up here within a few minutes the space inside can be heated up to temperature really fast. A heat pump and heat recovery system is the most cost-effective and efficient use of energy and it should be a choice for all homes. While this project was very specific to this site and to our brief what's really exciting is we'll be able to take this new typology away and apply it to houses and projects in the future.