Klas Hyllén Architecture

A house for a textile artist and a keen mid-century furniture collector rising, phoenix like, from a dilapidated stone haha wall surrounding the existing site. This project has allowed us to carefully place a series of built forms within the open fields of rural Somerset. A sequence of volumes and walls pushed to the edges of the site to create a clear boundary between the domestic and wider landscape where the building is the boundary and cows graze just beyond the living room window behind the reinstated haha wall. 

The design is for a new super-insulated, airtight and environmentally conscious home with integrated solar panels and heat recovery systems, building on the Passivhaus principles. Balancing these design principles with a need to reduce overheating to large areas of glazing we combined various solar shading ideas ranging from creating deeply recessed windows to shutters to inserting slim galvanised steel frames into the blue lias stonework or dark grey render. Steel was used for the very narrow profiles that steel offers and then galvanised for the beautiful finish which also provides long term protection against the weather. 

Photographs © Sam Smith