Practices land two of the three remaining finalists’ slots for 2022 award
A contemporary house with mock-Tudor influences in south-west London and the redevelopment of a former labourer’s cottage in Suffolk have become the latest additions to the RIBA House of the Year 2022 shortlist.
The projects, by Surman Weston and Haysom Ward Miller Architects, take the fifth and sixth places on the shortlist, alongside homes by David Kohn, RX Architects, Sandy Rendel and Prewett Bizley. A seventh and final shortlisted scheme is due to be announced next week.
Surman Weston’s Surbiton Springs home, which is also known as Ditton Hill House, was one of two projects from the practice to win a RIBA London Award earlier this year. The other – Hackney School of Food – went on to win the Stephen Lawrence Prize.
The brief for Surbiton Springs was to deliver a two-storey detached house on a suburban street in Surbiton. The client’s brief was for a two-bedroomed home with an industrial aesthetic, but not simply a minimalist open plan-box.
House of the Year judges said Surman Weston’s solution “successfully blends vernacular mock-Tudor and industrial aesthetics into a unique and appropriate hybrid”.
They said the home’s traditional A-frame elevation borrows suburban language but turns it on its head by expressing it in an exoskeletal steel frame – the “materiality of modernity”.
While the frame is combined with slurried-brick infill panels, the garden elevation features Crittal-style glazing that offers a contemporary twist on leaded windows, “combined with the freshness of a Palm Springs summer house”.
Inside, a triple-height entrance hall featuring “deliberately raw” materials leads through to the home’s living areas, which respond to the client’s brief by offering a variety of scales and spatial experiences. The material palette becomes increasingly warmer.
Haysom Ward Miller’s Suffolk Cottage, at Bury St Edmunds, is the family home of practice director Tom Miller and associate director Liz Miller.
The project has stabilised a crumbly flint-walled cottage and added new elements onto the original four rooms, opening up the house to views of the surrounding landscape.
A shared family room now runs across the back of the house a half-level up from the original cottage’s ground floor, enabling it to look over the neighbouring field. Worked onto that are two cabins and a bathroom for the family’s adult children.
The home’s main bedroom has been tucked into the first floor and features opened-up roof space with views over fields.
Judges said Haysom Ward Miller’s use of half-levels throughout the house had turned a “relatively modest” sequence of rooms into a “playful and surprising journey through the life of the family”.
They added that Suffolk Cottage was one of the top three domestic projects submitted for a RIBA award in 2022 in terms of its energy performance, addressing the RIBA 2025 benchmark with both predicted and actual energy use, and bettering it with the use of onsite photovoltaics.
Judges also praised the use of reclaimed bricks and flint blocks.
Surman Weston and Haysom Ward Miller’s shortlisting was announced as part of Channel 4’s Grand Designs House of the Year 2022 programme last night. The seventh and final shortlisted project will be announced on 7 December; the winner will be also be revealed during that programme.
Alison Brooks Architects won last year’s award for the practice’s House on the Hill project in rural Gloucestershire.
Full longlist: RIBA House of the Year 2022
:: Derwent Valley Villa, Derbyshire, by Blee Halligan
:: House at Lough Beg, Northern Ireland, by McGonigle McGrath
:: Leyton House, London, by McMahon Architecture
:: Mere House, Cambridgeshire, by Mole Architects
:: Mews House Deep Retrofit, London, by Prewett Bizley Architects
:: Mountain View, London, by CAN
:: Norfolk Barn, Norfolk, by 31/44 Architects and Taylor Made Space
:: Ostro Passivhaus, Scotland, by Paper Igloo
:: Peeking house, London, by Fletcher Crane Architects
:: Ravine House, Derbyshire, by Chiles Evans & Care Architects
:: Seabreeze, East Sussex, by RX Architects
:: Suffolk Cottage, Suffolk, by Haysom Ward Miller Architects
:: Surbiton Springs, London, by Surman Weston
:: The Cowshed, Dorset, by Crawshaw Architects
:: The Den, Scotland, by Technique Architecture and Design in collaboration with Stallan-Brand
:: The Dutch Barn, West Sussex, by Sandy Rendel Architects
:: The Garden Studio, Norfolk, by Brisco Loran and James Alder Architects
:: The Library House, London, by Macdonald Wright Architects
:: The Parchment Works, Northamptonshire, by Will Gamble Architects
:: The Red House, Dorset, by David Kohn Architects
No comments yet