South Street
The brief was for a sustainable, contemporary family home that made the most of a dramatic but constrained brownfield site on the banks of the River Ouse in Lewes, which historically functioned as a wharf for the old quarry and cement works behind.
The house occupies a prominent position overlooking the river and Nature Reserve floodplain beyond and is set against the backdrop of the chalk cliffs of the South Downs. Though it lies within the South Downs National Park and on the edge of a Conservation Area, the planners encouraged us to develop a bold and striking design to reflect its position at the gateway into the town.
Our ambition was to design a house that was unique and worthy of this site, but that respected its history and surroundings through its form and choice of materials.
The main body of the house is a simple two-storey pitched-roof structure reminiscent of the adjoining buildings, but with a ridge line that is carved away to break down the building’s scale and reflect the contours of the cliff face behind. In addition, the simple plan arrangement has been subtly distorted at each end to draw in the key views and provide a covered terrace protected from the weather and buffered from the sound of the adjacent road.
We selected a simple palette of self-finished materials and used them to emphasise the building’s form. Each was carefully chosen to be robust, weather naturally, develop character and reflect the tonal and material qualities of the site and surroundings.
On the ground floor, an exposed frame is constructed of board-marked concrete, reflecting the tone and texture of the rugged in-situ concrete river wall below. Facing onto South Street, the walls are built of handmade ash-glazed Sussex brickwork, traditional to the town, giving a softer texture and more intimate scale to the street.
Above the muted tones of this masonry base, the first-floor walls and roofs are wrapped in a homogeneous rainscreen skin that articulates the form of this upper volume. For this, we used a Cor-Ten steel expanded mesh that weathers naturally to a striking red/ochre colour. This echoes the local red clay brickwork and tiles, yet remains distinct and alludes to the site’s industrial heritage.
Traditional architectural elements such as gutters and eaves have been removed or concealed behind the mesh rainscreen to allow crisp, clean detailing of this continuous surface and emphasise the primary form.
