'Imagine building a house in one of the most
perfect landscapes in the world. A place which is not only staggeringly
beautiful, but where there are no niggling planning restrictions,
no nit-picking district surveyors, not even any regulations telling
you how to join one stone to another. There is as much space as
you will ever need. There are no human neighbours for miles. Oh,
and it is very, very cheap.
'You will have gathered that this is not exactly
Hampstead, or the Gorbals, come to that. So for a
pair of hard-pressed British urban architects, Hugh
Cullum and Richard Nightingale, this house was like
a deep breath of fresh air. Cullum and Nightingale
were accustomed to the British way: having to fight
to get even little buildings and little alterations
woven in to the fabric of the city, with a dozen
different interests ready to breathe down your neck
and suggest, nay, insist, that you do something rather
different or not at all.
'Then they were told: design a big house next to Lake Naivasha
in Kenya. Do it how you like. The land's there, the outlook's magnificent,
you'll have to use local materials and labour. Watch out for leopards,
and don't forget to say hello to the hippos. Or words to that effect.
'Nightingale knew all about this, havoing been born and raised
in Kenya. Cullum sprang from Canada, but both trained as architects
at Cambridge, where there is a strong tradition of humane moderism,
very different from the sometimes outlandish products of the fashionable
London schools. Working from their cluttered Georgian office in
King's Cross, London, they have designed and built a string of houses
in the lake-bedecked Rift Valley of southern Kenya, and are now
half-way through building the new British High Commission in Nairobi,
a project they won against stiff competition.
'Known in Britiain for their attention to detail
and ability to make the most of every square inch
of space, in Kenya they had the chance to throw away
the tape measure along with the rule book; which
makes it all the more interesting to find that, left
to their own devices, their instinct was entirely
the correct one: to build out of the landscape, and
to tap into the way things are put together locally.
'Having been brought up in a classic planter's
house, Nightingale knew what his point of departure
was going to be. "Colonial farm buildings here
consist of a string of rooms with a veranda along
the front and probably along the back as well," he
observes. "People virtually live on the verandas
during the daytime, and the rooms inside tend to
be very dark. In the house we built, the veranda
is separated from the house so that you get light
in."
'This is something of an understatement. The Ward House, as it
is known after its owners, Simon and Raye Ward, sits on a hillside
running down to the lake where the hippos wallow. Cullum and Nightingale
have taken the idea of the veranda and pulled it out into a lofty
triangular platform perched high - nearly 20ft - above the ground
on columns made of old telegraph poles. This viewing platform is
built around a tall and spreading thorn tree which provides a natural
canopy from the sun. In this high part of Kenya it gets hot during
the day - though seldom so uncomfortably humid as an English summer,
Nightingale observes - and very cold at night. So when you retire
inside from the veranda, you are in a house made with thick walls
of the local grey volcanic stone - a classic 'thermal buffer' to
iron out such heat and cold fluctuations.
'The stone was cut on site, fairly roughly,
and has a timeless quality, as if grown from the
earth. The roof is the normal settler's corrugated
iron, of the kind that provides the traditional drumming
effect when the heavy rains come to fill up the lake:
however, the architect's hand is apparent from the
fact that this is a single-pitch roof, visible only
from the landward side. From the lake, the house
appears as a craggy all-stone structure.
'The house is arranged with two wings in the
V-formation, with the entrance at the point of the
intersection. On the far side of the stone-floored
entrance hall, big double doors open up the house
to views of the lake beyond. This is a double-height
hall, crossed at first-floor level by a timber bridge
linking the two wings. You have to cross the bridge
to get to the main run of first-floor bedrooms. What
look at first glance like wrought-iron rails to the
bridge balustrade and the veranda turn out to be
simply dirt-cheap steel reinforcement rods, as used
in concrete, further evidence of how none of the
materials used is costly or imported.
'It is the kind of house that can take the rather ad hoc clutter
of life on an 8,000-acre African ranch, where a five-bedroom house
like this, with servants' quarters, is by no means unusual or extravagant,
even though it is enormous by British standards. "It probably
costs less than people in this country would spend on their kitchen
refurbishments," says Nightingale. The comfortable furnishings,
the rugs on the polished wooden floors, the rough unplastered stone
walls and the speed with which vegetation grows up the outside all
conspire to make this a house that looks as if it has been part
of the scenery for many years. Only the occasional touch, such as
the internal metal zig-zag trusses to the timber-boarded roofs,
give away the fact that this is a thoroughly contemporary building.
'The interiors are designed deliberately to
relate to the landscape. In the main living room,
for instance, you are, slightly perversely, denied
views of the lake; this is to encourage you to wander
out on to the lofty triangular veranda, where the
stupendous view opens up right across to the dormant
volcanoes on the far side.
'For the two architects, this kind of work is release from the
complexities of designing in Britain. "It enables you to indulge
your fantasies a little, in a way you can seldom do in this country,"
says Nightingale, "and, because it's at a distance, you can't
worry too much about how it's built."
'I wouldn't worry too much, either. Hands up
who might consider swapping their kitchen refurbishments
for this? I think the ayes have it.'
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