Richard Bingham continues his Shoreham Unlisted series on the unsung heroes of Shoreham’s architecture by looking at a stylish family house on Shoreham Beach.
In many of the houses along the foreshore, the accommodation is upside down. Residents live upstairs, sleep downstairs.
That’s certainly the case at 18 Old Fort Road, an award-winning, four bedroom family house built in 2015 to a design by Hove architects and beachfront specialists ABIR.
The ground floor has a fortified appearance adapted to what the architects called the “harsh” conditions of the beach. Small windows are set in thick, dark frames. The gabions – stainless steel wire cages to you and me – that form the beach-facing walls are filled with pebbles.
Rather than collecting these pebbles from Shoreham Beach itself – a definite no-no – the architects sourced the stones from a firm that dredges the beach at Hastings. Yet they selected them to match the tone and colour of Shoreham’s native pebbles.
If downstairs is a redoubt for sleeping – “secure, private and grounded,” as Giles Ings of ABIR describes it – upstairs is uncompromisingly for daytime, and a daytime of sunlight and superb views.
The large, open plan living-cum-dining room occupies most of the space upstairs. Glazed doors lead out onto a substantial morning terrace that takes up the south-eastern corner of the property. Such blurring of the boundaries between indoors and outdoors is a long-established trope of the kind of open-air modern architecture that has for a long time found a welcome home by the ocean.
Because it’s the extensive glazing on the first floor makes the most of the location’s main attraction – that wonderful, south-facing sea view.
But a day spent broiling in the sun can lead to glare and over-heating. To avoid both, ABIR had specialist coatings added to the south-facing glass. Indeed, the high-performance, aluminium-clad windows took up nearly one third of the modest construction budget of £320,000.
Having the internal structure made from solid material also creates a heat sink, further reducing solar gain. Finally, natural ventilation – opening roof lights, doors and windows – means the house cools down quickly, even in the height of summer.
Conversely, heat loss is minimised in the colder months. The architects describe the house as having a “tea cosy effect”. Walls are fashioned from Durisol blocks formed from recycled wood pallets and filled with 165mm insulation and 120mm concrete to minimise heat loss in the winter. Low air permeability means the house meets the latest building standards in terms of reducing energy demand.
Sustainability is enhanced by an air source heat pump, while demolition material from the existing bungalow was recycled into the substructure of the new building.
It looks good, too. The beach façade features a pleasing variety of materials. As well as the pebbles and glass, sweet chestnut wooden cladding has been applied beneath the shallow pitched roofs. Exposure to the elements means that the wood has already started to silver.
Shoreham Beach was mostly developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then Shoreham was not the fashionable address it has recently become. The result is the housing on the beach has a suburban feel to it. Large plots, bungalows, pitched roofs, uPVC cladding, dormer windows – these things might make for comfortable homes, but they do not exactly set the architectural pulses racing.
That’s why so many of the people buying properties on the foreshore choose to knock down the existing buildings and replace them with more modern-looking houses. Too many of these, however, are fat white cubes with predictable ribbon glazing. The swollen houses jostle the boundaries of their plots and bulge outwards to the beach.
Modernism on steroids, perhaps.
By contrast, 18 Old Fort Road remains both subtle and elegant. Subtle because of its low-slung appearance and the way it fits politely into its plot. Instead of overshadowing is neighbours, the house follows the existing building line.
The house is elegant, too. Elegant in the variety of materials deployed and in the contrast between the ground and first floors. Elegant as well in the shallow pitch of its varied roof line, and the corner terrace.
No wonder, then, that ABIR’s design has won accolades. In 2017 the beach house in Shoreham won both a RIBA South East Award and the Daily Telegraph Home Of The Year Award.
As the foreshore quickly becomes one of the south coast’s property hotspots, 18 Old Fort Road is the kind of modern glamour we could all use.
