HME: A house for a gardener and a house for a housewife, Craigmillar, Edinburgh.

Project Text

Gardener
This liberally-minded 32 year old single woman is passionate about growing, nurturing and enjoying plants and herbs. A hippy of sorts, she enjoys solitude and being surrounded by nature and her ideal home reflects her personal ideals of healthy living and respect for natural resources. Ideas of sustainability, orientation for sun and daylighting and natural ventilation are all important considerations. As a highly creative individual her ideal home reflects and accomodates her abilities to grow and nuture a healthy living built environment.

Housewife
A conservative 31 year old, this relatively happily married woman has four kids, two of whom are confined to wheelchairs. Her kids and her home are her life and she takes great care and pride in both. Accessibility for the wheelchairs is essential along with a flexible approach to the use of rooms within her ideal home. She is a very private person who doesn't need much social input from outwith her family and therefore doesn't require much space for entertaining or accomodating groups of friends.

Character Relationship
The two clients, while similar in many ways (age, security and privacy concerns, limited social life) have almost opposite outlooks in both personal and political terms. Both have removed themselves from public life to a certain extent and take solace in a very personal activities. The housewife is devoted to her four children, including her disabled twins who require constant attention. The gardener is deeply involved in the growing and nuturing of plants in her house. Their ideal homes reflect these passions and mesh together in an interlinked form yet offer private spaces that are very separate from each other.

Site Organisation
The gardener inhabits a vertical garden, the housewife a single-level home centred around a private courtyard. Although no space is shared physically between the two clients, visual links are strong between the semi-private spaces of each home. For instance, the housewife may sit in her courtyard and contemplate the jungle-like planted facade of the vertical garden that defines the northern edge of the plot; the gardener may take the morning sun on a viewing terrace on her first floor and contemplate the tree canopy of the courtyard. With carefully positioned and targeted encounters, mutual trust can be encouraged: both parties can freely use their privates spaces without fear of being overlooked, whilst still having the opportunity to use their more exposed public spaces.

Experience in Use
Both homes use layers as a way of achieving these mutable public/private interfaces. The gardener has angular planes of steel mesh on which plant material can be grown and opaque cladding panels positioned where privacy for both parties must be accomodated. Behind the planes of mesh and vegetation in the vertical garden, a tertiary layer consists of sliding glazed doors and fair-face concrete walls. The first floor accomodates a kitchen with east- and south-facing decks. From here an internal flight of stairs leads to a bedroom and shower room with access to an east-facing deck accessed from the bedroom, whilst a south- and west-facing deck gives access to an external stairway which leads to the top floor roof garden. This level is partially covered and screened on all sides with the steel mesh system. Materials used in the building are predominantly fair-face in-situ concrete, stainless steel mesh, glass and plant material. Timber floors are found on the outdoor decks and terraces and a copper cladding system carries from the roof below up the south elevations. Taking up the remainder of the ground floor area, the housewife and her family live around an angular coutryard that is accessible from all the sleeping areas and the combined lounge/dining area. Glazed full height doors open in many combinations onto the outdoor space, taking full advantage of the sun as it moves across each internal elevation. A deeper layer of sliding wood doors give a final screen of privacy to the sleeping areas. Disabled accessible bath and shower-rooms are situated in the corners furthest from the courtyard around which the main circulation of the house occurs. Materials used in the building are more traditional in comparison to the vertical garden: rendered masonry walls, glazed wooden doors and timber floors throughout. Light is brought into deeper situated rooms through clerestory windows that allow the roof to hover above the solid walls. The copper cladding of the roof is folded up the elevation of the vertical garden and provides an element of consistency between the two different built forms.