By on 5 Jan 2016
Whether it’s shuttered, polished or even replica (one project featured cementitious resin as a flooring — a lower-cost alternative to polished flooring and softer underfoot), concrete has become the favourite raw material of choice for homeowners looking to introduce industrial style to their projects.
Used sparingly throughout Jake Edgley’s winning project (shown above), with a pairing of polished concrete floors and shuttered concrete walls – the wood grain finish was achieved using timber formwork – the result is simply stunning.
Versatile, rustic and lending warmth, timber has become the go-to material for those seeking to bring texture to their projects — both inside and out. Whether it’s dark-stained pine (above) to add contrast and help the home to blend in with its surroundings, rough sawn oak left to weather to a silver grey (below), birch, western red cedar, larch or plywood lining the walls, ceilings and floors to provide a warm and cosy space, timber cladding featured heavily among this year’s shortlisted homes.
Paired with traditional or modern furnishings, this raw material can easily be integrated into any home as these projects go to show.
While bringing natural light into the home is a recurring theme, it can be easy to forget how important achieving a well-balanced artificial lighting scheme can be — many treating this element of the design as an after-thought, placing a few pendants and downlights wherever there’s space.
Consideration of your home’s lighting should be planned out well in advance, but some of this year’s architects have gone one step further and taken to introducing lighting within the fabric of the building.
Overall Winner Jake Edgley’s project (above) was no exception — in order to create the illusion of the glazed bridge (which connects the two halves of his London self-build) floating when lit at night, he attached strips of LEDs to aluminium foils (which act as a heat sink) and fitted these to the ceiling edges. The result is truly spectacular to see. In fact, this proved so atmospheric that Jake took to lighting the entire home from the room edges, with no downlights in sight. That’s not to mention the dramatic handmade pendants in the double-height stairwells.
Extending views through the house, the use of internal glazing has gained in popularity with 2015’s crop of houses. Allowing light to reach into even the most central sections of the floorplan, incorporating internal glazing can offer glimpses of adjacent rooms and create the illusion of space and volume.
Whether you run a series of clerestory windows between rooms to allow light but maintain an element of privacy, or go big with large glazed panels running up to the ceiling (such as in this project by Graham Bizley), internal glazing is a great way of bringing light, and views, into the home.
Wishing to shut clutter off from the rest of the house, it seems homeowners and architects are coming up with new solutions for introducing clever storage into their homes.
One of the most chaotic rooms in the house is often the kitchen, which sees all manner of activities taking place — from cooking to cleaning, eating and socialising. Given today’s trend for open plan kitchen diners however, it can be difficult to hide cooking mess when guests come round for dinner. Built-in units behind doors (such as in this project above from Phillips Tracey Architects) allows the homeowners to close off unsightly dirty dishes while entertaining friends and family.
A key staple of traditional architecture, the veranda appears to be making a comeback if this year’s best homes are anything to go by. From New England-style wrap-arounds to sheltered timber frame additions – allowing homeowners to enjoy the outdoors even on wintery days – the veranda has proved the perfect accessory to homes both contemporary and classic.
