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Pooley House

The clients are keen on outdoor living – barbeques, cycling and windsurfing, so the house is designed to indulge their passion.
Located on Sandy Point in the southeast corner of Hayling Island, the site sits on the shore with fabulous views eastwards across to Chichester Harbour. The site is quite narrow and constrained. It sits in a run of jaunty seaside houses that hint at the Art Deco style.
The design began with the desire to exploit first floor living, with a cedar-clad ‘box’ containing an open-plan living space that combines with outdoor decks to enjoy the sea views and catch the sun at all times of the day.

The house sits on a raised brick plinth designed to deal with a 1:100 year predicted flood risk and also contains storage for bikes, kayaks and windsurf gear. Ground floor accommodation straddles the site and contains bathrooms and bedrooms, with hard floors and robust simple finishes to cope with wetsuit-clad users – the upper floor is provides a large living space that focuses on the harbour views.

A staircase slides up the northern flank and is contained within a frameless glazed sleeve, like a lantern, and opens into the main living space, which is conceived as a camera obscura, a timber-lined telescope that pulls in the view, while simultaneously projecting the occupant out to the horizon through a fully glazed screen onto the harbour. A south facing terrace to the south provides an outdoor living space.

The ground floor is masonry construction, externally insulated and acrylic rendered, while the upper ‘box’ is steel framed with large cantilevers each end, infilled with studwork and clad in western red cedar boarding.

The main approach in terms of performance on this building was to maximize the passive energy strategies, so the external envelope is highly insulated, while an air source heat pump serves underfloor heating.

At the heart of the house lies a wood-burning stove to provide delight in the cold winter evenings after a day out on the water.

Client Jonathan Pooley & Dawn Reid
Status Completed (2010)
Contract value £455,000
GIA m2 190 m2
Structural engineer Ramboll UK
Contractor Andrews Building South
Project manager Dawn Reid
Photography © James Morris

RIBA South Award 2012

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