‹ close and return
Marsh View is located in an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ on the North Norfolk coast amongst fresh and saltwater marshlands. It sits at the end of a lane beside four 1950s bungalows in a small hamlet close to Burnham Market. Our project comprises the demolition of a bungalow and the reconstruction of parts of this building within a new composition of fragments in the landscape, forming a holiday house or a sort of modern villa. The bungalow had been built from a pattern book of designs, applied by a builder to a regularly divided plot of land, and took no account of the setting. The first phase of works were completed in 2003 and in 2008 we added a studio and a carport.
The primary sensation of North Norfolk is the extensity of the horizon. The ground is often moist and subject to tidal fluctuations which blur an obvious distinction between coast and hinterland. Rare birds draw your attention across the broad sky, whilst human figures and buildings enable you to gain a sense of scale in the vastness of wind and watery light. Our design seeks to explore the building's relationship with the landscape and the marsh view.
As well as enabling a visual connection to the horizon, the project encourages movement from inside to out in a variety of ways. A heated black concrete floor extends throughout the ground level and unites the various external and internal spaces as a sequence of ‘rooms in the landscape’. These spatial conditions are seen less in terms of fixed functions and more as a fluid series of places for participation within the overall architectural setting. This includes the garden and the marsh.
We are interested in the power of an image to become a symbol. In this case, the scale-less chimney seems to suggest that a much older mode of inhabitation has re-established itself beneath the wide sky and deep horizon.
When we remember and also as we see, meanings and nuances slip back and forth from the actual to the suggestive. New art can have an archaic quality, and a new building can appear older than the one it replaces. Our loss of an intellectual centre, and its architectural analogue in the hearth or Temple, throws us outwards to the natural world and we fall back upon our own resources and the company of friends. In writing and reading, thinking and drawing, we experience this gap. A holiday might be the time when serious work is done.
