Medieval cottage encased within new home embraces layers

come on bad come on mate this is a common so it's public land common land is actually owned by people but everybody has a right on it so this is owned by the National Trust but we have a right to walk on it you have to have if you have grazers rights you can put sheep and pigs cattle and horses on it it was normally the worst land it was like the top of the hill where the soil is the thinnest and it was kind of left over land and if you were a peasant without any money or property you can graze it and you don't have to pay for it so that's common land so this is common this side that means people interact with our building here they look through the window and I kind of feel we have a duty to the public if people look through the window I very often invite them in to explain the story to them because architecture is a public art it is something that people outside the building have a right to interface with come on bear I think it was probably a Dowager house but anyway when we came here there was this ruin here there was actually three this was a house this was a house and in about 1975 these were all proper houses but once you get a little bit of a hole in the in the roof property deteriorates very quickly this building is totally falling down yeah once the roof goes everything goes this was a total ruin it was so covered in ivy when we came here that a lot of people you know you didn't notice here it was so overgrown so come on inside so I mean this is the this is probably one of the most unique norms I've ever seen yeah sure I think the best way to see it is to see it from here then you kind of get it so this part of the house was probably a stable built for animals and it fell down altogether this was probably for humans and was a bit better made and so it stood up well I'll tell you the real story is I was quite happy to put a bulldozer through it because I just thought I could rebuild this but I wasn't allowed to because our property is listed that means it's protected it was really dangerous to go into it and the conservation officer just said you've got to preserve it so he actually suggested taking the frame down and putting it back and rebuilding it but actually I just thought it'd be a lot cheaper and easier to just put a whole building over the top of it so the other thing is this involves some cost to preserve a building it's about it's not quite half but I would say at least the costs a third or more to keep the building so it's sudden it gave the existing building value so my theory was if it's going to give it value everything here is expensive everything in the old stuff is very valuable so that includes the ivy the dust the cobwebs everything it has a value so we didn't want to destroy it as a matter of fact during the process it was really difficult to tell people that this was really the bit that was really expensive you see if you've got a new wall like that people tend to protect it and they'll tend to bash the old stuff around so you need to keep telling people in our children who would shoot down the good bits with their guns you know with their BB guns they shot out the glass in the windows which was really annoying so we've just put another building over the top of it and everything is preserved there's actually a steel frame around the new building and then this is anchored to the steel frame it's probably quite stable but we just making sure it didn't all fall over one day it would have come out that would have been the staples and that's why we're allowed to build that to here but we have certain rules that we set up for ourselves so here the windows could be exactly as we wanted them to do in terms of performance in the old part of the building we always followed the existing windows so there's two sets of windows in most places there's an old window of the new window on the outside so we left exactly the window as it is the old window including the broken glass which if you need to open this window you cut your hand on as you do that as you can see but it's possible it's inconvenient but it's worth it I don't quite know why it's worth it but it is I just want to like the kitchen here one of the things is I want so it's not a fitted kitchen it's actually kept away from the walls and so it doesn't touch them and that was kind of part of the idea that you know you don't damage the walls because they have value but it could all be just taken out and the walls will all be the same so you can see how that was remain yeah I think these are about 300 years old but you can see this is called Durban wattle this wood is put across on the frame and then this is a plaster which is squashed onto it and then it's normally mixed with horse to reinforce it then it makes a wall like this on the other side as you can see Sir horsehair they put horsehair in the plaster normally remember horses with the main source of power so we forgot those yes there would have probably been hundreds of horses on this estate if not more you know this would be part of the croft castle and that's a big stage and they would have had a lot of horses so these are brick ties and they're probably from about 2000 the year 2000 and they were hanging here when we came here and because we have this rule of not touching anything we left them I mean like everything there's quite modern bricks here you treat it all as a kind of of something to be preserved even if they're 10 years old or something and these beams surprisingly enough sometimes we had to cut through them like this see it's although it's incredibly old it's incredibly solid it's oak and it's actually gone like rock over the years and these beams actually incredibly strong sometimes they rotted away when we built this we built this with everybody local so I've got friends of local farmer and whenever we needed a detour just knock us up a bracket like that and that would hold the end of this rotted beam so we kind of used farmers to build it and lots of local trade for example all of the corrugated iron came from down the road and steel frame came from down the road almost everything came from down the road you know she looks like you just dropped the metal structure on top of the old no yes yeah I think it is I mean this floor had fallen through here so and there was a staircase in this position you can see that it used to be a staircase here coming down and so we've kind of put the staircase back in so here you you see that it was only a left yeah that was it all the roof would come down here and also the building fell to bits a bit as we were working on it you know we had to dig out all the floors it became unstable building is a kind of clumsy process people knock things around this looks like it's gonna fall then look any minute it will but we'll have to just clear that up this is a living project it is also I just want to point out we preserved the cobwebs we don't clean the cobwebs on the old stuff but we clean it on the new stuff so you took this just sort of an extreme obviously preserving didn't mean you had to preserve the ivy and all that but I tried to preserve it it died I think it didn't get enough sunlight I was hoping it would keep growing so there's a little a little bathroom in here so that's kind of tucked in yeah I like the showers that work well there's lots of space to lay out your stuff like shelves and most proud of this flush you press it there and goes through a cistern up here and then the water comes down here because we didn't have room there's a massive old beam in here bit which we didn't want to cut so this is the guest bedroom this is where mainly we have people who work with us stay here because we're quite isolated we have to have people come and help us in the office and design yeah we're designers I did this with my wife Kate Bobby who is in London this weekend so they used to be a floor from here to here but it fell through with the roof had gone here as well so the floor went and you can see that joist used to go across here and that was the great for this room you get it when you see the great the fireplace suspended in midair and then I made that face and now would have been the end of the house yeah and that would have been the window so that's why it's got another window here but this deteriorated a lot no no it's actually as a conservation piece this piece is seriously conserved now if you wanted to study three hundred-year-old cottage frames this would be a really good place to study it the building will not deteriorate any further because it's not keeping the weather out anymore the new building keeps the weather out if we repaired the old building it would still have to repel the moisture and that's the main problem with conservation so this frame may be preserved for another 300 years whilst the existing ones may not last that long so it is a kind of conservation project what I think a lot of people like about this is a familiar shape so the shape is dictated by the building underneath which is a cottage the cottage probably had a thatched roof which means that the roofs the roofs are very steep about 49 degrees and that was necessary to make the thatch work as opposed to tiles or modern membranes can actually be flat it's a kind of iconic shape and that is what people tend to like and then the material that sits clad in it's just a very simple corrugated iron so this is the corrugated iron and corrugated iron was invented in London in about 1820 so it's quite an old material the reason we used it is because it's used in farm buildings everywhere and it's used all over the countryside in Herefordshire it's very familiar as a matter of fact when we finish this job somebody on the common came up to me and said you should convert that barn I just want to show you these marks this is why we had to preserve everything as you can see the marks of the carpenters it's a code that the joiners would have whether the carpenters would have in order that they could fit it all together and there may even be bits of other houses here because they would reuse houses you have to I mean what you have to remember is before power tools you know a beam or something was an immense labour to cut you'd have to cut it by hand with probably double edged sword so everything would be done by hand without power tool so everything had real value in a way so you may if you had a beam from another cottage you try and reuse it but then they have these codes to how to fit it together because that was the give a conservation officer looked at this and said you've got to keep it all and I thought that just cost me 80 thousand pounds that conversation it's the most expensive conversation I've ever had in my life I think so this is a living room so here you can see the windows again yeah but it's it's quite nice that I like that and then this is sacking I don't know what this was for really but it was here I think it was used as a saddle room I think these were putting saddles on perhaps it was used as an outhouse as well as you know this obviously was a main fireplace with a bread oven so it was occupied but it may have been abandoned and becomes kind of stable or something and this some special conservationists told me what this was but I've forgotten what if this I found a lot of pictures in our store which all went damp and moldy so I hung those up so you weren't afraid to use modern fixtures oh that's kind of to do with it performing you know these are the really good windows I have to say I like the things that perform in a modern way and if you're building something you should at least keep the place warm and efficient like on the roof we have Peavey's and then we have a water collection system for hot water it's my favorite detail this post here existing post which holds the floor above we were worried about it was really eaten through so we really didn't know how strong that was so we went down the road and bought a piece of steel with the farm my friend Martin the farmer and we stuck the piece of steel in and we screwed it up and I'm sure that piece of steel is gonna hold the floor above and I just like that simplicity of doing stuff like that and look here's some bricks which are probably quite new but they got preserved you can see their modern bricks used in fill between the old love and stuff Suey away a lot of this was impromptu you were saw something yeah we had a problem so we just going by piece of steel and screw it in just screwed in with some Phillips screws and I call her back we had a split beam here so when it got a couple of old bits of timber and just bolted it either side of the beam I've got the splint and you can see that we had to put a plywood here so he painted it black so that actually spreads the load over here because this we're never really sure how strong everything is and I just want to show you two things we've moved in here for about a year or so and then we found this tin can which we hadn't noticed and we thought it would be full of gold coins and it wasn't it's full of junk anyway it's a nice thin can and I kind of like that and then I did want to show you the birds nests oh yeah we've got to go upstairs so the house is also it's actually also designed to be a three bedroom house with two bathrooms this is actually designed to be a bedroom this little space here if we needed it and we would cut a hole go through to that bathroom but I do like that wall and look at the cobwebs there how good they are but with look there's a bird's nest here we just discovered that yeah yeah forever so when you first came this ivy was alive everything was alive we had to cut it all off it was destroying the building so there was so little left yeah that's why I was kind of surprised that we had to preserve it so this like for instance this theme seems oh it's really it's rubbish it really looked it has been eaten away but it's probably not holding anything probably that's holding everything together and then like I say we have strapped it all up it seems pretty solid it's pretty it's pretty precarious I think so we put some plywood across it yeah that's a good question I don't think we've had three people up here normally we do we did the testing by jumping up and down on things we actually had an engineer and he said that there was so much to calculate he just gave up actually so me and the farmer did it by jumping on things but I mean I could do that and this is a small scale I can't do that and a big thing do you like being surrounded by decay yes something that reminds you you know it doesn't this I don't know it's like a lot of things you don't notice stuff after a while I mean there's that phrase memento mori right like it doesn't remind you of your own my own decay that's a really good really really interesting idea because I am despite what everybody else says I am decaying we are it's interesting our fascination with decay it is I like that question about it being about my own fate my own what's it means remember you will die but just live that way right so I don't know if architecture can do that for you to remind you that you know take advantage of these moments nothing's forever and maybe that's you philosophical but I kind of like it it's quite nice to see the old stuff in there that door is where the old original door was you can see actually the hinges I think see some hinges from here there used to be a door here in many ways it was incredibly pragmatic this job we got an old building we can't knock it down didn't really want to repair it it was beyond repair so what do you do you stick something over that you put another building on the top of it to protect it that's kind of it but you do know that you're working with something romantic in a way and something unusual and I'm really glad that we weren't allowed knock this thing down because if I had to build something new within this envelope it would be it would be really interesting but I don't think I could have made it 300 years old interesting it's quite a difficult thing to beat you know for example if you look at this route here with all of the Ivy here that's difficult to beat I can't do it you know if you had to make a modern building you have to compete with that and I just don't think I could do it I don't want to be unromantic but it was very pragmatic once you're spending 80 thousand pounds to preserve something I think I want to preserve it all you know there's the kind of pragmatism about it I kind of like that about architecture is it has to be pragmatic as well as as poetic otherwise it's pretty useless you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 437,306

Rating: 4.8553176 out of 5

Keywords: abandoned cottage, abandoned architecture, adaptive urbanism, lean urbanism, wattle and daub, craftsmanship, craft building, architectural heritage, architectural preservation, 18th century cottage, time and architecture, kate darby, david connor, croft lodge, herefordshire, england, house inside house, house within house, croft lodge cottage, croft lodge studio, david connor design, kate darby architects, poetics of space, bachelard, gaston bachelard, psychogeography

Id: iuRrlu9m64k

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019