The Impact of Style

One of the things that were important to me during the design phase of our new house relates to the style. Why is style so important to us, or perhaps I should say some of us. Many people around the world do things and build things in a traditional way, the same way that these things have been done for centuries.

When I was young I didn't think about style much, my world was not completely inundated with advertising and electronic blasts about what I should wear, eat or live in. The first home that I remember was a brick semi detached Victorian two story house in West London. There was a small brick wall at the pavement (sidewalk) and no plantings other than a bit of worn down grass for the front garden and the gate was missing. At the curb which was formed with long rectangular bars of granite, stood a huge elm tree that the United Dairies horse would munch on the suckers of at the bottom. In this country there seems to have developed over the last 30 years or so a style of housing that is mostly auto centric. Basically in many newer areas what we have is a large garage with a living quarters stuck on the side and back of it. The front garden for the most part completely subservient to the driveway of the double wide garage door. It seems to me that this "Style" of house is possibly the ugliest that we could possibly have devised. The style of homes that appealed to me were the ones in the older often pre-world war two neighbourhoods. These homes had back lanes and the garage was out of sight of the street.

Our new home would follow the example of these much earlier and mostly smaller homes. So getting back to the issue of style, I recall reading somewhere that "form follows function". I chose to follow this thought as a guiding principle in tackling the design of the house. How do we live? what do we do when we arrive home? what is our climate like during the different times of the year? What do we want to use to heat our house? what about light? access? I suppose had we been buying a ready made house we would have had these thoughts in the back of our minds when looking at potential candidates for our purchase. I suspect though that the look of the house (style) would have been a very big part of the choice.

At the moment the outside of our new house is simply sheeted with plywood, we have been discussing types of finishes and their durability, How will the outside fit into the surrounding environment. How will our new home look in the winter versus the summer? We cannot see our house from the main road, and we have to pass up a small hill and turn a corner at the top of the driveway. The driveway is basically like a cart track two gravelly paths separated by a strip of grass down the middle. a push mower keeps the grass in check.

The layout of the spaces that we wanted were the stating point, the home is sited so that we can take advantage of the sun's energy, the longest wall runs east west along the south side of the house. The largest room in the house is the full width and faces the south. To take advantage of the sun we needed to include a fair area of windows, these were fabricated on site using recycled sliding patio doors. The largest window is formed from four doors, the old wooden frames were removed from the doors and the thermopane glass cleaned of all the caulking then fitted into a new frame. The rest of the south windows were fabricated in a similar manner. We chose to combine the living room and dining room as one inclusive space with the kitchen area at the west end separated from the dining area by a high counter. Our lifestyle is casual so we did not think it was necessary to incorporate a formal living room or dining room into the house.