Gracing the edges of a quiet Scottish hamlet, Nick and Jane Paterson’s house comes as a striking surprise. A contemporary, cedar-clad statement designed for upside-down living, it would not be out of place in a style- conscious corner of Austria or Switzerland. But here we are, a dozen miles from Edinburgh, looking out across fallow farmland and the beach banks of the Firth of Forth, a short walk away.
Making the most of these enticing views partly explains the arrangement of this family home, with open-plan living spaces on the top floor — bathed in light from large windows and roof lights — and three bedrooms plus bathrooms down at ground level. It’s an arrangement common to a new breed of alpine and continental homes, yet still rare across Scotland and the rest of Britain, where we seem stuck with the more traditional “beds on top” way of doing things.
“It really works on this site because it can be quite dark in winter, and this way we get extra sunlight coming down through the skylights into the main living space,” says Jane, who founded Paterson Architects with Nick in 2002. Their own home was one of their first projects. “It’s not to everybody’s taste and wouldn’t suit every location, but it works well for us.
“There isn’t that sense of opening up the ground floor to the garden, which might be something you have to lose in an upside-down house. But here the garden is limited anyway. We don’t have a direct relationship with the garden apart from a visual one, but in the summer we will open up the bedroom windows and the kids can go in and out.”
With fields all around, a large garden doesn’t seem such a priority here, and in any case, they can always head next door to Jane’s parents’ garden: the 200sq m (2,150sq ft) site was once her parents’ garage and a corner of their curtilage. The Patersons bought the site, valued at £160,000, after moving back to Scotland from London three years ago. Two larger sites in the same hamlet — perhaps the last available in this former farmstead location — have just gone on the market at £350,000.
Advertisement
“It was strange coming back to where I grew up,” says Jane. “My parents bought their bungalow next door in 1965, when I was just three months old. Now we do feel outsiders in a way, having lived in Glasgow and then in London for 10 years. It is a small community of about 40 houses, and so really as a family we are coming in from outside, and only moved in three months ago. We love the house, but in a way we are still in transition. It’s been a project and now we need to settle into it as our home. The children still call it ‘the new house’.”
The couple first met at Glasgow’s Mackintosh School of Architecture and have been together ever since. They both worked in Glasgow after graduating and then moved to London, where they went to work with Piers Gough and his practice CZWG. Jane left to have their first child, Arabella, now 8, while Edinburgh-born Nick stayed on for a few more years and then went to work for Norman Foster.
After the death of their second child, Charlotte, from long-term health complications in 2001, they began to think about moving out of their home in south London and starting afresh. It took them three years to make the break and move back to Scotland, where they have the support of Jane’s parents and Nick’s mother, still in Edinburgh. By then Louisa, now 3, had arrived, and they knew they had the opportunity to start a practice and build their own home.
“For us, the new house is the last step in the grieving process for Charlotte because our old home in London was bought with her in mind,” says Jane. “We wanted to start afresh and knew we could buy the site and build something new.”
Nick says: “We didn’t want to come up here and build something that was ordinary. It is a difficult site in some ways, but there are also some great things about it, especially the views. There was the potential for us to live in a very different way to the way we lived in London.”
Advertisement
The two began to think about the design, drawing inspiration from barns and old agricultural buildings, as well as Scottish tower houses — modest castles sitting alone in the landscape. The house evolved from such references and their interest in fresh ways of living from the continent, as well as from the constraints of the site itself.
Given that many of the houses in the hamlet are one-and-a-half storey new-builds from the 1990s, and others are low-slung, converted farm labourers’ cottages, there was a height restriction on any new building. The Patersons also needed to be sensitive to the concerns of their new neighbours. They positioned the house facing north over farmland towards Fife, avoiding windows that overlooked homes to the rear. The planning process with East Lothian council went much more smoothly than either had expected.
“We actually found them to be really supportive and encouraging,” says Jane, who is now working on plans for a music department for a local school and a veterinary clinic. “When we first looked at the project we went to see the head of planning, and he was very welcoming. It is a modern house, but it’s not in a conservation area — there are 1960s and 1990s houses nearby, and they do want to encourage the use of timber framing and cladding in the countryside, partly for environmental reasons but also for the links to traditional agricultural buildings.”
To meet the height restriction and achieve full ceiling height for two storeys, the Patersons excavated into the site and used waterproof concrete to create a sunken platform for the timber house to sit on. Bedrooms were placed on the eastern, less exposed side of the house for privacy, with plenty of built-in storage created throughout this modestly sized home of 120sqm (1,292sq ft). Upstairs, apart from a small office and a utility room, the living spaces were kept open-plan, with two large skylights piercing the flat roof above. The main seating area is around the large window looking out across the fields and the Forth, with sofas and chairs arranged around a Danish wood-burning stove.
Towards the opposite, more enclosed, end of the house is a galley kitchen, partially screened off from the rest of the space by a monolithic screen unit that also holds the cooker. A slot cut into the screen allows whoever is cooking to see out into the living room and beyond.
Advertisement
“We did look at more extreme ideas, so I think it’s actually quite conservative,” says Nick, who is back working with Foster & Partners in Edinburgh on the Royal Infirmary redevelopment. “The local paper said it looked like a storage container and we rather liked that description.”
The budget to build the house was £200,000 — about £1,670 a sq m, which is high for Scotland, where £1,000 is more common. But the house’s spec was high, and items such as the waterproof concrete and the western red cedar cladding drove costs upwards. The house has since been valued at £300,000- £350,000, although valuation is difficult because there is so little to compare it with locally. Traditional homes in the hamlet have recently sold for between £265,000 and £375,000.
“In terms of value we were happy,” says Jane, “especially when you compare it with what you could get for the money in Edinburgh. And we do see it as a kind of prototype for the kind of houses that could be built not just in Scotland, but in other parts of Britain. It will appeal to people like us, moving out of the city back to the countryside but wanting something modern that also fits into the landscape.”
Paterson Architects, 01875 852 211, www.patersonarchitects.com