The Shaded Slab

The organizing idea is a single concrete slab, ninety feet by fifty, floating three feet clear of the walls it appears to rest on. Every enclosure below it stops short of the underside, so a continuous band of shadow and moving air runs around the entire perimeter of the house at ceiling height. This costs a lot to build and it earns it back through the six hot weeks of late summer. Hot air collects under the slab and leaves through the gap rather than pushing down into the rooms. On a September afternoon the difference between standing inside this house and standing inside its neighbor is roughly seven degrees and completely obvious. Beneath the slab the plan is loose. Four bedrooms and the living spaces are arranged as separate masonry volumes in sawn limestone, with glazing filling the gaps between them, so the walls read as objects placed under a canopy rather than as the structure of a building. Nothing but eight columns actually holds the roof up. The concrete was board-marked with reclaimed shuttering ply, and the soffit is the finish surface: every service is buried in the slab, so the underside is unbroken from one end of the house to the other. There is not a single downlight in the main volume; all lighting is indirect, off the stone. Steel louvers on the west screen the afternoon and are hand-operable, on tracks, rather than motorized. The architect argued for this on the grounds that motors fail and hands do not.