Behind closed doors: The Orchards by Prewett Bizley

If the right place to start talking about a public building is the entrance then surely the right place to start with a home is in the bedroom, from where the inhabitants experience it afresh each morning. So here it is: a modest double bed, a picture window looking out over the Somerset fields leading to the floodplain confluence of two small rivers, delicately fluted oak joinery at the headboard. But very little else. 

The young couple who live at The Orchards had dwelt in tight Victorian spaces in London and then in a tall, narrow house in the nearby market town of Frome as they built this home. With one young child and then another on the way they were used to things being on top of them. Walking round with the architect, Graham Bizley of Prewett Bizley, they explain their logic: plenty of space for things, but out of the way. Then you can live with few things visible, and enjoy the clean lines.

Those clean lines delineate the flow of the house, floating over the polished concrete floors and running from one space into another with the odd cheekily exuberant curve, where the lines take a little skip. You see this happy little curve in circular or semi-circular windows, in the top edge of the panelling, on the rounded corners of built-in benches. Ply-panelled walls hold the secret to the sharpness of the lines with banks of almost invisible cupboards, high, low, even right in front of you at the front door, where you don’t realise there is an expansive boot room with rails of coats and shoes on angled display. The visible pegs hang empty. Nicola and Fred (not their real names) demonstrate every little hidey hole with delight on their faces. They can pad off to the coffee machine, tucked away in the larder, without tripping on stray socks or a muddy shoe. 

The kitchen flows into the snug living room – except when it doesn’t – and the living room itself is tucked away as a pocket door springs out to divide the two. ‘Our youngest didn’t even realise there was a room there for some months,’ says Nicola. There are none of the awkward corners of wardrobes because there is a dressing room. In fact, there is very little furniture because the basics are built in.

Stepping out of the larder (or better, pantry) with our hot coffee, we are back to admiring the lines: the kitchen island, the picture window and the landscape, with no overbearing high-level cupboards and not a complex appliance in sight. ‘Though we have put plants there instead,’ says Nicola in mock disbelief at the alternative clutter they have conjured up. She sits alongside the window by the covered terrace to work in an uncharacteristically intense set of shelves with a small built-in desk, but she also ranges around the house as she takes calls, or hides away upstairs in one of the pair of guest rooms-cum-studies when the children come home. 

Experienced through the eyes of Nicola and Fred this is a house of savoured moments. We will come back to those, but first to try and understand the art that is behind this home. On the first view of the information on the house it is the plan that attracts your attention – and admiration. It has a kind of modesty to it: a rectangle with a central corridor but at each end the living spaces and main bedroom are offset, creating their own outdoor spaces.

The entrance (behind a desirably simple pivoting metal gate) and kitchen face south, onto fruit trees. But not directly, because there is a wide verandah to stand under and watch the rain pour down, or to soak up the low winter sun or shelter from the hot summer one. Here the brick plinth steps up and out as a bench for wellies to be pulled on. On the other side of the house the loggia catches the long view and some of the south-west light.

But what you can’t get from the plan is the spatial delight in the levels and volumes, up to the underside of the shallow pitched roof. The bedroom wing is hunkered down into the falling ground, so you step down into it, even as the ceiling rises at the apex of the room. It makes it easy to believe that Bizley really does design from below, as suggested by his worms-eye view axonometric (but flick through the thick book of sketches he bound for Nicola and Fred and it is clear he looked at it every which way). Here the ply panelling is painted, with the curve used around the house mediating the different heights. 

Bizley imagined this like a street on a Greek island, light coming from above, a narrow stair (oh so delicate), a view out to water (though the retaining pond doesn’t fill up too often). It has become more than a corridor, with children using the steps to perform from as they scoot out of their bath to the window seat, where wet hair is brushed into shape. 

At second level are the spaces for those close to the family: children coming for a party, houseguests going to the two rooms upstairs. The large room labelled as a multi-use room was split in two when I visited: a gym to one side (screen and cycling machine easily hidden away of course) and a playroom to the other. This is also the party room and overflow guest room (with futons stored in deep cupboards under the eaves). 

At the lowest level are the modest family bedrooms under exposed timber rafters, and the joyful service areas and bathrooms. The utility room is a reminder of what a privilege it is to design homes on a decent budget: an intense terrazzo-coloured room with everything thought through and resolved – from drying space to pull-down ladders for more storage; it is bigger than many peoples’ kitchens. Both bathrooms have natural light from above and from more than one side; the toplit shower, which pushes out from the rectangular form of the house, makes a statement of its own about the pleasure of ablutions. Finished in smooth tadelakt plaster, it benefits from the whole-house MHVR and low humidity. 

Air quality was an area of professional interest for Fred so the chimney breast of the living room is just symbolic, as the bioenthanol stove needs no chimney. A semi-circular window punches a hole in the heavy, curving chimney breast. 

Externally, one could see the form of the house as looking a little awkward – the pop-up two-bedroom section lacks the harmony of the interior. And, perhaps in the future, planting and landscaping could further mediate between inside and out to ensure that what could seem a plain house becomes as deeply embedded in its Somerset landscape as its residents are in the home itself. 

In numbers

Total contract cost  £1.87m
GIFA 303m² 
GIFA cost £6172/m² 
Annual electricity use 42.9 kWh/m²
Whole-life carbon A1-C4  565kg CO₂e
Form of contract JCT ICD