We just love being here – the minute you get out the car, you just get this overwhelming feeling of tranquility.

The Daily Telegraph

A complete showpiece village of landmark new homes by some of the best architects in Britain, and the world, is about to be built in the Cotswolds.

The Sunday Times

...International architects have designed strikingly modern houses for a waterside development in the Cotswolds.

Today Programme Radio 4

Perhaps a quality standard to aim for is that offered by the up market homes to be found not far away in the nature reserve of Lower Mill Estate in the Cotswolds.

The Sunday Times

Having spent a long weekend on Lower Mill I have to report that it certainly transcends the merely very good kind of leisure development you see about the place and …peeking well into the remarkable sector of the market.

Financial Times

...What it offers seems to be a combination of ease and comfort: the level of involvement in everything from planning to moving in, to swimming with otters, is up to you.

Country Life

An idyllic new community of second homes.

The Daily Telegraph

A spectacular collection of modernist houses.

The Daily Telegraph

...and further on there’s Tetbury, famously Chas ‘n’ Camilla-ville, which has approximately 45m antiques outlets and a cosmic tea shop. The Trouble House on the Cirenceser road coming out of Rebury is one of the few Michelin-starred gastro pubs in Britain.

Financial Times

My design philosophy is to create a space that allows my client to feel safe, conformable, relaxed and happy. I am convinced that a calm, quiet and harmonious interior can be as beneficial to health as a sensible diet and regular exercise. I am delighted to join the team in creating something truly remarkable.

Kelly Hoppen

The spa brings you back to nature providing treatments, meditation, yoga, swimming pools, Pilates and a way of being that removes the city effect.

...it is all very well buying your Manor House, spending hundreds of thousands on restructuring and battling with local authorities to change a light bulb, but sometimes all you want is a property which affords very little bother for a huge amount of pleasure.

Country Life

...will soon have a London standard restaurant on site – and even has its own organic farm on which residents and their children will be welcome to work for fun.

Financial Times

...if the mini-sub sized trout that my friend Neil, with no previous fishing experience, was pulling out of the lakes was anything to go by – it is worth the cost a house on the estate.

Financial Times

Only one fifth of the development is for housing, with the remainder set aside for the nature reserve.

The Times

The ambition for the Lower Mill Estate has been to create a uniquely designed, constructed and managed living environment within a 550 acre nature reserve which is home to some of Britain’s rarest plants, birds and animals of European significance.

Ellen Landscape Design

The cacophony of natural sounds on Lower Mill is completely captivating.

Financial Times

It is possible with a two hour walk to see and hear nightingales, otters, deer, Kingfishers, grebes, owls, bee orchids and badgers.

Will Vicary

This is a terrific project in a wonderful environment

Paul Finch, Government advisor on architecture

I should think there will be queues a mile long to buy these homes - Paul Finch Government advisor on architecture Lower Mill Estate has taken the concept of housing and nature conservatuion further

BBC’s The Culture Show

The attitude behind Lower Mill is a real breath of fresh air

BBC’s The Culture Show

I like the master plan with its dynamic houses surrounded by nature

Andrew Graham – Dixon – arts correspondent for the Telegraph and BBC

Daily Telegraph    02/07/2005

A cool £10m for holiday home next door to Highgrove

By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent    

A spectacular collection of modernist houses - featuring exploding roofs, revolving storeys and bedrooms that lose their ceilings and slide out over a lake in warm weather - are planned for the heart of the Cotswolds, just a few miles down the road from the Prince of Wales's home.

One of England's most adventurous property developers will unveil the plans next week for the 46 houses designed by many of the world's leading avant-garde architects.

The houses - intended to be "country homes" for a new breed of country squire more likely to be an IT millionaire than a Master of Fox Hounds - will be as far removed from the traditional, honeycoloured villas and manors of the Cotswolds as could be.

They are each unique and will cost up to £10 million - though the purchasers can only live there for 11 months of the year. And they will be built just four miles from Highgrove, the Gloucestershire home of Prince Charles, champion of the classical and the hand-crafted who famously described plans for a modernist extension of the National Gallery as a "monstrous carbuncle".

The developer, Jeremy Paxton, a visionary or a villain depending on your architectural taste, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that his scheme was a strike against the fashion for pastiche and faux vernacular architecture sweeping the countryside.

He said: "It is time architecture in this country was shaken up. There isn't anything like this anywhere in Britain and I expect these houses to be regarded as icons in 300 years.

"Every one of the designs will be such cool places to live in. This is respect for modernism and I want it to shape the future for country houses"

Mr Paxton, 45, a former magazine publisher, has quietly assembled a team of 22 architects, the shock troops of the avant-garde.

He will unveil the first eight houses on Monday. They include designs by Will Alsop, who once designed a plan to turn Barnsley into a Tuscan hilltop town, Piers Gough, co-designer of a giant futuristic sports complex and block of flats on the Hove seafront, Eva Jiricna, designer of the Faith Zone at the Millennium Dome, and Sarah Featherstone, a young architect in the East End of London specialising in private houses. Frank Gehry, the designer of the armadillo-shaped Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is in discussion to join the list.

The designs may startle Cotswold traditionalists. The houses by Alsop and the American architect Roger Sherman both contain whole rooms that can be slid out over the lakes, while others feature roof-top swimming pools and cinemas. The houses are planned for Lower Mill Estate, 600 acres including seven lakes of the Cotswold Water Park, near Cirencester, owned by Mr Paxton. There, gradually, he is building an idyllic new community of second homes - a rival of a kind to the Prince of Wales's modern "traditional" village, Poundbury, in Dorset.

The majority of Lower Mill is a Site of Special Scientific Interest but Mr Paxton has planning permission to build 574 homes. Scattered among the humbler abodes will be his 46 architectural surprises.

Interiors and luxuries for these homes are not fixed. Buyers will negotiate specifications with their architect after paying between £500,000 and £1.5 million for a plot. Mr Paxton will then build the homes, pushing prices up to between £2 million and £10 million.
 

Sunday Times    July 03, 2005

Living Space: Cotswold utopia

A developer has gathered together some of the world’s most radical architects for a dream housing project. Hugh Pearman reports on the extraordinary plans for Lower Mill Estate

How things do change. A few years back, it was rare to find a one-off modernist house being built in the English countryside; they were effectively banned by the planners, who would grudgingly allow only the pastiche-rural look. Then tastes changed, and modernist homes started to pop up here and there, usually replacing existing post-war houses deemed expendable. But now something truly extraordinary is about to happen. A complete showpiece village of landmark new homes by some of the best architects in Britain, and the world, is about to be built. In the Cotswolds.

The Cotswolds are all about sleepy honey-coloured stone villages where time has stood still ever since Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, aren’t they? Isn’t it harder to build contemporary stuff there than anywhere else in England? Perhaps — but the Cotswolds also boast their very own post-industrial brownfield area, a zone of former gravel pits near Cirencester that is now being turned into a mini Lake District known as the Cotswold Water Park. And at one end of this, on the Lower Mill Estate, next to the village of Somerford Keynes, developer Jeremy Paxton is dreaming his ambitious dream.

The estate — developed by Paxton as a nature reserve with homes attached — already exists as a burgeoning enclave of second homes, popular among Londoners wanting a version of rural life that has none of the pitfalls of the real thing.

At first, Paxton built modest modern-vernacular houses. Then, guided by Richard Reid, his master-planning architect, he started thinking bigger. Reid designed the estate’s first landmark house, a big modernist ocean liner of a home called Somerford Villa. It worked — and sold — and is now valued at more than £2m. So Paxton and Reid cooked up the idea of a scattering of such star homes across the 550-acre estate. The Landmark Homes project, to be launched tomorrow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the result.

Reid has put together a roster of 22 architects he likes and admires. They are an eclectic mix of established British names such as Will Alsop, Eva Jiricna, Piers Gough, Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones (a partnership best known for its Royal Opera House redevelopment in London’s Covent Garden) and Reid himself, plus a rising group known for adventurous, sometimes eccentric, private houses. These are represented by the likes of Alison Brooks, Sarah Featherstone, Pierre d’ Avoine, Adrian James, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Edinburgh- based Sutherland Hussey.

Then there are the ones from overseas. The star names here are America’s master of white modernism, Richard Meier, plus the radical Greg Lynn from California, whose buildings tend to resemble marine organisms. Other American “starchitects” are being wooed, among them Frank Gehry. There are a couple of Chinese architects, and a German one.

How are the local planners about all this? They helped develop the idea, says Reid. “The local authority guys had seen a building I’d done in the area and felt that it was perhaps a model to develop,” he says, “so we began to discuss the notion of creating an architecture of leisure. They liked that approach.”

Given that these are all holiday homes — if very upmarket ones, with price tags likely to be anything up to £5m, and a handy airfield nearby — the architects have been able to design a bit more freely than they might for a year-round house. All have opted for homes that can open up to the water and landscape in interesting ways.

Featherstone’s organic design is based on the bee orchids found on the site, and takes the form of an opening flower bud.

The house Alsop proposes is deceptively simple — a kind of flared tube made of a series of timber arches. It is designed so that the entire ground floor can slide out from the main house into a “winter garden” conservatory, and then further out over the water.

Other architects also make bits of their houses move. Californian Roger Sherman’s Spec-Deck-House, to be built over water, will have three bedrooms floating on pontoons — and these can be pushed out into the lake so that you can sleep out under the stars, enclosed only by mosquito screens.

Not to be outdone, Reid’s Sundance Villa is a circular house set high on a central shaft — again very California- influenced — where the whole top floor, including the living/dining room with kitchen and a bedroom/study, revolves to catch the sun, the breezes and the views at different times of day.

After gymnastics such as this, and the looping timber coil-of-rope design by Piers Gough, complete with rooftop pool (“as relaxed as a holiday home should be,” remarks Gough), it’s a bit of a relief to come across a couple of relatively understated rectangular designs by Jiricna and Sutherland Hussey.

Jiricna, the mistress of understated high-tech chic, has designed a simple but sumptuous box on stilts (mirror-polished stilts, mind) complete with one of her trademark sweeping glass spiral staircases linking the two levels inside. Charlie Sutherland and Charlie Hussey revisit tradition with a modern reinterpretation of the boathouse. Their house is arranged in an L-shape around a boat dock, with a big rectangular timber-slat “arbour” placed over the whole lot, providing privacy and creating some dappled shade for the open areas.

Paxton, the man behind all of this, was a water-skiing enthusiast who moved into publishing water-sports magazines, then began to dabble in waterside developments such as marinas, and so found himself, by degrees, getting into the big league.

What swung a lot of the various planning watchdogs in his favour in the early days was his determination to make a nature reserve first, and a housing development second.

It doesn’t take much to get him on to the subject of the nightingales, otters, barn owls and even notoriously shy bitterns now living alongside the humans at Lower Mill.

This is an enclave of second homes that, at least in theory, helps to preserve the character of existing villages. Since second-homers notoriously sap the vitality from country areas by pushing up house prices and then disappearing during the week, then, in principle, a separate development of purely second homes (that’s a planning requirement) will absorb a lot of that demand and relieve the pressure on the hard-pressed old villages. And since this is technically a brownfield, formerly industrial, site, then it fits in with national housing guidelines as well.

Then again, the Lower Mill Estate, if it is successful, could start a ripple effect of country-property demand as buyers flock to check it out. Certainly, Paxton is now looking at the kind of money for his product that he could only have dreamt of in the early days of his career as a developer.

He talks of the sportsmen and film stars now taking an interest in his domain: “It’s important to me that people can get access to a great place like this for £350,000, but some of these people are not balking at £5m. That shows there is the appetite out there for an Alsop or a Gehry house.”

Talk is one thing, of course, signatures on contracts another. Wealthy people generally like to have houses tailor-made for them rather than choose from a catalogue, so these designs will very likely turn out to be starting positions rather than the last word.

Reid is engaging in some judicious juggling as Lower Mill gets built up. The Landmark Homes will be dotted across the whole estate as a foil to the more understated housing being built at the same time. That way, he says, the place becomes neither a bland housing estate nor an architectural zoo. Eventually, there will be maybe 40 or 50 of the Landmark Homes out of a total of 400-500 houses on the site.

This is a fascinating experiment, an attempt to make a leisure Utopia out of water and architecture. For Reid, it comes down to intriguing people. “The thing is to feel that there is a wonder out there,” he says. “That’s crucial.”
 

Financial Times    July 2 2005

Landmarks for the nature park

By Claire Dowdy

A mineral-quarry-turned-nature-park in a quiet corner of the Cotswolds may sound like an odd place for an architectural extravaganza.

But if property entrepreneur Jeremy Paxton has his way 600 acres of lakes, wildlife and biodiversity near the town of Cirencester will soon be home to a variety of aesthetically ambitious residences designed by leading contemporary architects.

The plan is for a sort of vast, upmarket nature reserve of 575 holiday homes, most of them fairly typical modern structures, called Lower Mill Estate. But strategically placed around the grounds will be one-off creations from the likes of Britons Will Alsop and Piers Gough and California-based Roger Sherman.

Many of these "Landmark Homes" are flights of fancy that would not usually make it off the drawing board, much less into the UK countryside. But Paxton, who acquired the property nine years ago, and architect and master planner Richard Reid have assembled 23 architects to fulfil the dream. Reid - who is well-immersed in Lower Mill Estate having spent the last four years mapping the design and layout of the standard holiday homes - has taught or worked with many of the names on the list and describes it as "fairly catholic mix of young and old". He himself was behind Somerford Villa, a tiered, boxy structure surrounded by windows that straddles land and water, with its front half resting on submerged columns. Paxton describes the house, which has already been built and sold for £1.5m, as the precursor to his entire scheme.

Now, eight more imagÂinative architect-designed houses, including another of Reid's design, are available, and although still on paper, the collection is delightfully eclectic. Alsop has designed a timber-framed, arched building, situated on a little island, with two storeys and three bedroom "pods" hanging off the main structure. Gough's Watermark House, meanwhile, is actually in the water and spirals up in a big loop to create three storeys, one of them housing four bedrooms. This house is one of the biggest in the group; all are intended to be relatively modest in size.

Paxton says he expects interested buyers to pick a design then ask for personal tweaks so the finished product is absolutely to their liking. Some of the Landmark properties will stand as "manor houses" with a handful of standard homes around them; others will be in several acres of their own land. In addition to being unashamedly contemporary (no period mansion pastiches here), they also make a nod towards eco-friendliness: sustainable materials abound, with natural daylight and ventilation exploited.

These concessions were important to Paxton, who says he is committed to creating a genuine wilderness for holidaymakers. "We are bombarded by stress and we want to get away and live more naturally in a nitrate-free environment," he explains. Lower Mill Estate should appeal to "savvy Londoners who want to be closer to nature", he adds. "It's such good therapy for the urban grind."

Paxton has so far invested £5m in his rural idyll and expects to part with £20m all told. (He also has his own second home on the site.) This October will see the opening of a £4.5m spa and a fancy restaurant.

The project will no doubt benefit from his decision to highlight innovative, one-off homes. But rounding up a collection of internationally known architects for a single job has become an increasingly popular ploy. Mexican entrepreneur Jorge Vergara Cabrera has done it for a cultural village he wants to build outside Guadalajara, commissioning Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne and Enrique Norten.

Then there is Madrid's new hotel Puerto America, with each floor done by a different "name" including John Pawson, Jean Nouvel, Marc Newson, Zaha Hadid (again), Norman Foster, Christian Liaigre and David Chipperfield.

The great and the good of architecture coming together for residential purposes is not new either. In the 1940s the Case Study Houses programme was initiated by John Entenza, the champion of modernism, in southern California. Twenty years later, there were about 30 properties by Piers Koenig, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and their ilk, who had been asked to create inexpensive, efficient model homes for the residential housing boom after the second world war.

More recently, New York's Long Island has played host to a scheme cooked up by developer Harry Coco Brown and architect Richard Meier. The intention of Sagaponac was to build tasteful properties that would stand in contrast to the sprawl of McMansions in the Hamptons, and those involved included Richard Rogers, Philip Johnson (again) and Zaha Hadid (yet again).

Such ambitions are not always fulfilled, however; neither JVC nor Sagaponac ever came to fruition. Still, Paxton - an experienced developer who co-founded then later sold his share of JPI and now owns construction company CBL - is confident the Landmark properties will see the light of day. He says he has Cotswold district council on his side and notes that as second homes on a brownfield site, his are not governed by the strict regulations of other new builds in open countryside.

Marcus Kitchen, Cotswold district council's principal planner, says he is "very excited" by the first eight designs. "But they are quite a departure from the norm," he adds. "I am hopeful the local authority will look on them sympathetically." He also points out that, as second homes, they can only be occupied for six months of the year. Buyers do not seem to mind, however. Aside from the sale of Somerford Villa, another home is under construction for a celebrity and Paxton had a request for a third priced at £5.5m.

If all goes to plan, there will be 50 "designer" houses, says Reid, who is also busy on the masterplan of a 80-hectare site on the outskirts of Bologna.

"We believe the Landmark Homes will provide extra character and act as a focal point for Lower Mill Estate," he says.