Russell Davies and Wendy Wilkie were able to march.
After raising six children from previous relationships in a converted five-bedroom barn within the countryside near Aberdeen, Scotland, all of the empty rooms and open spaces began to feel redundant.
“We began excited about what we desired to do next,” said Davies, 64, CEO of an oil company. For years, he said, we were essentially taxi drivers for youths – anything we desired to do, we needed to drive.
After that, the walkable lifestyle seemed more appealing. So he and Mrs Wilkie, 55, decided to construct a small modernist house that they’d own, striking distance from the middle of Aberdeen, a city of around 227,000, about 130 miles north of Edinburgh.
“When we began excited about where we desired to live, we made an inventory: We desired to be in the neighborhood; we desired to have the option to go to the pub on a Friday night; we desired to be near the bus route into town,” said Davies. “We desired to be near the shops so we didn’t should get within the automotive each time.”
When they began to go looking loads, they got engaged Brown & Brown Architects, an organization whose work they admired on Instagram, for assist in selecting a property and designing a house. For several years they looked for the right constructing site, but the most effective plots were all the time too removed from the town center.
Finally, in 2019, they became aware of a half-acre plot on the outskirts of Aberdeen that contained a dilapidated Nineteenth-century stone coach house that had been converted right into a house. “All the joists had bark beetles, and the old windows could possibly be pushed in for those who desired to,” said Davies. “It was just rotten and damp.”
But when Andrew Brown, who runs Brown & Brown together with his wife Kate Brown, gave his consent, the couple bought it for around £425,000 (about US$525,000), planning to demolish the old house to make way for the brand new one.
“They’ve been moving from rural to urban areas, which is the alternative of 90 percent of the projects we do,” Brown said. “Traditionally, people flee the town. But this lot is on the west end of Aberdeen, where there are some nice Victorian buildings and terraced houses. It’s a busy area, but considered one of the nicer ones, and there aren’t many opportunities to construct a latest constructing in a spot like this.”
As it turned out, the plot was in a conservation area, so even when the old stone constructing was collapsing, they couldn’t demolish it. “Generally, Historic Environment Scotland he doesn’t want any buildings to be torn down – even in the event that they are crumbling and collapsing, which was the case here,” Brown said.
The architects proposed a compromise: they’d keep the stone wall of the old house that was closest to the busy road and incorporate it into the brand new house. They then used stone from other partitions of the constructing to cover the brand new garage and construct a boundary wall by the sidewalk, which is common in the realm. After almost a 12 months and a half of negotiations, the town planning authorities accepted the thought.
Brown & Brown placed a garage on the front of the lot. From there, a roofed exterior colonnade with an old stone wall on one side results in the front door of the brand new 2,950-square-foot home. This passage is “like an airlock” that keeps the surface world at bay, Brown explained. “We attempt to separate the house from on a regular basis life a bit.”
The house itself consists of two boxes product of glass, concrete and larch slats, arranged perpendicularly and topped with green roofs. On the bottom floor, the kitchen with cabinets finished with composite slate fronts and a protracted island with a cantilevered microcement worktop is open to a glazed lounge. The double-height dining room is dominated by a carved spiral staircase built by joinery firm Angus & Mack from overlapping layers of birch plywood.
Upstairs, a smaller second level incorporates the master bedroom, guest room and residential gym. Built by contractor Coldwells Build, the home lasted a couple of 12 months and a half at a value of approx £1.2 million ($1.48 million). Mr. Davies and Mrs. Wilkie moved in last July.
Most of the home’s windows are positioned to supply views of the back garden or the green rooftops, which feature grasses and wildflowers which are “an extension of the garden,” Brown said. “We desired to create spaces that felt like they were in a garden, not next to a garden.”
The effect provides a “really peaceful home,” said Mrs Wilkie, especially because the stone partitions protect the home from the road, providing visual and auditory privacy.
“Because of the way in which Andrew designed it, with an enclosed garden and a colonnade, no person can look in, no person can hear us and we will not hear them,” Davies said. “When you sit within the lounge and look out the window, all you see is trees.”
They agreed that the home captures the most effective elements of rural and concrete life.
“You still feel such as you live within the country,” Mr. Davies said. “But you walk out the door and you might be two minutes from the bus stop and five minutes from the pub. That’s all we wanted.”
Sign up here for weekly residential property email updates.
