House in Linsiadar, Lewis

One of our client’s first briefing statements in commissioning the design of this new house was an encouragement to “do something bold with the old and the new”. A series of ruined buildings and structures on a Lewis croft are intended to be rebuilt/refurbished over the next five-ten years, gradually establishing a small-holding, taking posession of and revitalising the land. The house was the first step in this process, whilst thinking ahead how the ensemble as a whole would work. The site bears witness to several historical layers of built form and we were exercised by the issue of how to respond to this. In the context of contemporary local building patterns which tend to simply place the new alongside the abandoned old, we chose to critically engage with existing remains. The site’s unmitigated exposure in open landscape exerted a particularly strong influence on the form of the building, which we saw increasingly as a modest but nevertheless significant new detail in that landscape. The architecture is fundamentally determined by massing and texture rather than articulated elements or details – in some ways a climatic response characteristic of the local vernacular. The project is a new house which physically engages with the ruins of an existing dwelling to establish an innovative approach to 'old' and 'new' in rural settings, applicable and relevant in wider settings and contexts