Thatch-fest #3

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Matt Wood

Thanks to Rob Morrison (@morrisonbrink) for pointing me at this contemporary thatched house by Moering Architects in Germany. And I think there’s another thatched project on their website here, which looks even frutier; I hope they get to build it.

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Rural Sustainability #2

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Matt Wood

My Twitter ‘drag-net’ continues to throw up interesting nuggets that wouldn’t have come my way otherwise. This piece by Jamie Shorten in Town and Country Planning magazine, from 2007, addresses some themes which I touched on briefly all the way back in November last year, namely the question of rural sustainability. Continue reading →

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What’s this village doing here?

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Matt Wood

A rare sortie abroad in the last couple of weeks has reminded me that despite the great cost of holidaying overseas (in cash and carbon), it does give one the opportunity to see new things and have time to think about them. We spent a week at Celle dei Puccini, a tiny village in the Alpi Apaune north of Lucca, and I got to thinking about what on earth a village was doing there in the first place, half way up a mountain (a mountain by Norfolk standards at least), why it had apparently at some stage ‘died’, and what might bring it back to life. Continue reading →

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Bijou Beach-Huts

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Matt Wood

I was in Walberswick at the weekend – in an end-of-term, pre-holiday sort of mood. The tar-black huts along the staithe at Southwold are enough to make you want to reach for a hammer and nails and build something – or in my case, put pencil to paper (as I do all too infrequently these days). Continue reading →

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Beautiful Farm Buildings?

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Matt Wood

I’ve talked in previous posts about ‘farmsteads’ – one of the four ‘rural archetypes’ I identified for my guided tour of Norfolk with Beyond Green last summer. I suggested one might plan a relatively dense knot of new homes around a courtyard, as a way of upping the average density of a larger new development of new homes. It didn’t occur to me to take the reference literally. That is, I wasn’t thinking of new agricultural buildings when I made the analogy. Modern farm buildings are just big dull sheds, aren’t they? Continue reading →

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How to CRTB #6

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Matt Wood

At the start of June the Department for Communities and Local Government published a Guide to the Community Right to Build, which I noted was disappointingly short. I said I’d let you have my own version when it was finished. Since then I’ve had a lap-top melt-down which took an early draft with it. But here it is finally: Continue reading →

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The Wide-Fronted House #4

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Matt Wood

In a recent post I described how the square-on-plan semi, with front and back living rooms became ‘universal’ during the inter-War period. Private house-builders built three-quarters of the 4 million news homes produced in the period, mostly without the help of architects – so it’s perhaps not surprising that the profession has been so scornful of the ‘suburban semi’ ever since. Continue reading →

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Tesco Self-Build?

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Matt Wood

A piece on one of BD Online’s blog today was stressing about the prospect of Tesco getting involved in the UK self-build market, and idea which Housing Minister Grant Shapps has been toying with this week according to Building Design Magazine. Continue reading →

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The Wide-Fronted House #3

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Matt Wood

The terraced house was the norm for new homes during the late nineteenth century up to the First World War (see previous post), but thereafter it was the semi-detached house that emerged as the standard format for council-housing and private developer/builders alike. And as I have explained, despite the Tudor Walters Report’s promotion of the wide-fronted house (for reasons of ventilation and sunlight) the ‘front’ and ‘back’ rooms of the traditional terrace proved very enduring. Continue reading →

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The Wide-Fronted House #2

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Matt Wood

In a previous post (way back in October!) I wrote about the wide-fronted house, the third of four ‘rural archetypes’ I described during the tour of Norfolk I did for Beyond Green last summer. I explained that the three- then two-celled cottage evolved from the mediaeval hall-house to become the standard configuration for the rural house in Norfolk (indeed much of Britain) during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century industry replaced agriculture as the power-house of the British economy, and the focus for innovation in housing design moved from the countryside to the city. Continue reading →

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