Guy Hollaway has transformed his Kent home with an uncompromisingly modern addition
‘The Cottage’ is the culmination of many years’ work by Guy Hollaway Architects’ principal partner to realise his own family home. Drawing on the practice’s previous projects and driven by a desire to experiment, the house transforms an eighteenth-century cottage in the Kent countryside for twenty-first century family life. The Cottage, which is not listed, is a story of two halves, retaining the quintessential front facade and cottage garden, and adding a contrastingly modern rear extension that more than doubles the original floor area. The juxtaposition is exploited to provide a variety of spaces, from a cosy living room with a restored inglenook fireplace to an open-plan, light-filled kitchen and dining space, which opens out onto the contemporary rear garden.
The key to this transformation was “to challenge conventional living and to blur the boundaries between the old and new, where the two work together and create a whole that responds to the new modern living with the comfort of the old”, says Hollaway. “The two sides have required many different design and construction skills in respecting the traditional construction methods and in creating the new.”
Reconstructed internal brick walls with lime mortar and flush-joint pointing sit alongside continuous shadow gaps that flow into polished concrete floors, floating staircases and integrated seating and worktops. A transparent wall of glass doors slides back to merge seamlessly into an outdoor concrete ‘living room’ with a long cantilevered dining table and concrete zig-zag chair. The interwoven steps weave their way to form informal seating and link to a concrete lap pool with a glass-reinforced side. The sedum flat-roofed extension links the main house to an annexe, clad in shot-blasted larch. This wing, which doubles up as a gym and cinema room, is clad internally in plywood, which disguises accessible storage cupboards, concealed pocket doors to a shared bathroom and pull-down hidden beds for guest accommodation. A deep-bore ground-source heat pump fuels the underfloor heating set within all the floors and the bathroom walls.
“Without the usual constraints of client, contractor, budget or programme, this project has allowed for each specific item to be considered and developed to its most beautiful, practical and ultimately seemingly simple resolution”, says Hollaway. Design solutions evolved during the building process, with the project considered as a “personal three-dimensional drawing board”. “Like an autobiography, an architect’s own home should reveal their true beliefs – it will expose their thoughts and truths, as they live in fear of living with their own mistakes”, he suggests.
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