Alison Brooks

Alison Brooks Architect's Hide House is a hybrid patio house/ barn building that hovers over its waterside site like an amphibious craft. Clad in Corten steel and mirrored glass, the house is composed of trapezoidal openings that frame views to the landscape, sky and lake, allowing ever-changing water reflections to fill the house with moving light.

The Hide House is inspired by both the Modernist tradition of single storey houses as well as the work of the artist James Turrell, whose installations of precisely controlled apertures are instruments to intensify our experience of light, space and landscape.

In response to the densely populated site, the primary architectural move is to arrange the house around a central terrace, or outdoor room which would offer a degree external privacy not available elsewhere at Lower Mills. The terrace, placed on the central axis of the building, effectively divides the house in two:
1) a large top lit hall for cooking living and dining
2) a sleeping and accommodation wing. This area is further subdivided in to two parts with the master bedroom and bathroom separated from the other double bedrooms - the master bedroom becoming like an island within the house.

The chosen location for the house is at the North east edge of the south west lake of the Lower Mills masterplan. The house is 12 x 20 metre wide and spans completely across a small peninsula creating an isolated south facing private garden behind the house. The site location would allow the terrace and rear garden to fully exploit the benefits of the sun. In the evening the sun would be framed across the lake in the large window at the back of the Hall and in framed opening at the back of the internal terrace.

The repeating architectural motif of projecting or recessed trapezoidal openings is intended to express the solidity and hence the privacy of the building as well as sculpturally identifying important views- across the lake, across the courtyard, of the sky. These projections and indentations would read as clearly inside the building as outside giving a sense of the house as both reaching out to or receding from the landscape beyond. The house breathes in and out. Some of the projections create a sloping floor surfaces, further emphasizing the houses 3-dimensional purity, kind of like being inside a carved block of wood.

The house construction is primarily prefabricated timber panels on an elevated concrete slab on piles. The panelised timber walls and ceilings have an inner skin of birch veneer plywood that is left exposed, the structure as the finish material. The floor can also be timber panels, thus making the interior an experience of a pure 3-dimensional timber surface that blurs the distinction between vertical and horizontal surfaces, roof and walls, up and down. The exterior is a contrasting pallette of corten steel and mirrored glass panels which will transform at night into either clear openings or glowing translucent surfaces.

Finally ABA propose that the landscape of the peninsula itself could be sculpted to integrate with the buildings architecture form. The ramp to the house would be read as a continuation of the folded facades and the peninsula would be triangulated to resemble the houses trapezoidal projections. Such landscaping treatment would be an important part of defining the Landmark feel of the Courtyard house.