Designed by Hall + Bednarczyk, the Nook is a new-build four bedroom family house set in a secluded valley in Monmouthshire. Planning permission for this 250m2 home was secured to replace a drab 1960’s bungalow that had previously occupied a corner of the 1 acre Wye Valley site. The aim of the project was to establish a durable and flexible home that capitalised on the best qualities of its setting. The privacy of the house’s rural location enables generous areas of glazing to be employed, illuminating the living spaces with natural light as well as framing views of the surrounding landscape, which appears to pass though the home.
The design adopts the simple, confident massing evident in the region’s agricultural structures, where both traditional stone barns and the spare steel-framed modern structures now used by farmers tend to possess a visual clarity and generosity of scale absent from most rural dwellings. A rectangular floor plan provided efficiency, flexibility and economy. The adoption of a steel frame enabled significant spans to cater for large openings in the building elevation and allowed the structural flexibility to omit floor sections and thereby create expansive and playful spaces within the interior. Large sliding glass panels open up the elevations to the outside.
