Coffey Architects has replaced a 1930s cottage on the north Devon coast with a house that fits happily with its neighbours but makes a big statement inside, finds Richard Weston.

The single-storey volume and large hipped roof reflect the massing of the 1930s house it has replaced.

Words
Richard Weston
Photos
Timothy Soar and Phil Coffey

Architect and author Richard Weston ponders the architectural influences and interests that have converged to create a building defined by cinematic grandeur and an unforgettable play of light. He also discusses the project with Phil Coffey and Architecture Today editor Isabel Allen in an episode of our podcast, AT Conversations.

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Largely untouched by architectural thought, the mediocrity of English suburbia is rarely more apparent than when it sprawls along majestic stretches of coastline. Mortehoe in north Devon, site of Coffey Architects’ most recent house, is sadly no exception. Close to the northern tip of Woolacombe Beach’s three miles of unbroken sand, haunt of surfers and seals, a huddle of houses forms part of a conservation area. The houses, set above dark slate, enjoy splendid views out to the Atlantic.

Cove Ridge replaces a 1930s house, and does so with an apparent fidelity to the massing of the original that makes it hard to spot among the jumble of some three dozen white-rendered, slate-roofed neighbours. The accommodation is 30% larger, but the original form – a single-storey volume surmounted by a large hipped roof – has in all essentials been preserved. The new house is, as one would expect, far more crisply detailed than the rest, with a hidden gutter of the type often favoured by Lutyens lending a razor-blade sharpness to the eaves. The first sign of modernity is the arrow-straight, stepped route up to the entrance, replacing a meandering journey of the kind Le Corbusier condemned as “the donkey’s path”. It leads past a detached garden store, and finally establishes a diagonal which is made the armature of the spatial organisation. The house’s ground floor, with its bedroom wing and living spaces, is neat but deliberately routine in its planning, and elegantly negotiates the relationship to the slate cliff.

The house’s excitement lies above in what practice director Phil Coffey describes as a “sollar”, reviving an archaic word that denoted an open balcony or gallery at the top of a house. The diagonal stair, slightly wider than one might expect, leads into this open attic, home to the kitchen and dining areas.

Phil Coffey uses the word “sollar” to describe the upper floor, an open attic housing the kitchen and dining areas and offering framed views of the sea.

What seemed from the outside a “regular” hipped roof turns out to be a subtly irregular interplay of slightly splayed geometries. The ridge has been sliced off by a flat rooflight, and panoramic windows and balconies are cut out of the sloping surfaces. These offer both to-die-for framed views of the sea – Coffey likens the effect to deeprevealed Victorian windows in dark-painted rooms – and a Kahnian play of “slices of the sun” that is as unexpected as it is monumental.

Coffey sees Aalto as an inspiration for his planning, and Cove Ridge also brings to mind the Aalto-influenced houses of Alvaro Siza. More remote, but perhaps more pertinent, is the work of Tadao Ando. Speaking at the RIBA in 1986, Ando introduced his acclaimed Koshino House, by pointing out that although his plans were often – misleadingly in his view – described as “minimal”, his aim was to create a rich variety of experiences, primarily through light, within a simple-seeming geometric frame. Moreover, he added, he composed by thinking in terms of a sequence of views, along the lines of a traditional Japanese stroll garden, not through the abstraction of plans.

There is, I think, an interesting link here to Coffey’s work. The son of a photographer, he has travelled the world with his camera. Photographs are, by definition, records of light, but many of Coffey’s celebrate light in ways that require a rare mastery of exposure and composition. Reflecting on two exquisite albumen prints of a river, taken by French photographer Ildefonse Rousset in the early 1860s, the poet Théophile Gautier noted how “a delicate diamond-speckled festoon shimmers along its shores, and,here and there, patches of light fall from the sky on to the water’s dark ice through the shredded foliage”.

Located at the tip of Woolacombe Beach, the house enjoys splendid views out to the Atlantic.

Looking at the plans and sections of Cove Ridge, I am only too willing to confess that I don’t find it easy to see quite how the extraordinary play of light is conjured up. I hope (lest it is a sign that my ability to read such things is fading!) that the design method involves the use of ray-tracing software to study and adjust “the magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”.

As a compositional strategy, the picturesque is not, however, without its dangers. It is well to remember that the strongest painting of the late 19th century came not from the ephemeral effects beloved of the impressionists, but from Cézanne’s dogged pursuit of form and space rendered by coloured planes. Aldo Rossi captured the vital balance between permanence and atmosphere perfectly. Watching fog enter and transform Alberti’s great church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, he observed that “architecture is made possible by the confrontation of a precise form with time and the elements”. Inside the apparently quotidian form of the hipped roof of Cove Ridge, Coffey has conjured an interplay of surfaces and apertures that structure and incite an unforgettable play of light.

The architectural promenade culminates in a view through the skylight that slices through the ridge of the roof.

This description brings to mind Coffey’s handling of filtered light in buildings such as the extension to the Science Museum and the recent office and retail development on Handyside. His fascination with light reflects the (English) picturesque aesthetic, which proved so influential in France, both on early photography and on the emergence of impressionism. As a compositional method, the 19th-century ideas developed in gardens were later deployed by Mies van der Rohe. Far from being an exercise in “abstract” geometry, the Barcelona Pavilion was envisaged as something to please and surprise the moving eye. An initial layout was surely made as a plan drawing, but it was adjusted and refined by eye, using models with moveable planes and a series of exquisite perspectives in which he studied the effects of light and reflections.

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