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Shingle House

General Description NORD were approached to design and coordinate the building of a four bedroom holiday home at Dungeness in Kent. The client, Living-Architecture is described as a ‘social enterprise’, building holiday homes by selected architecture firms with the aim to “allow people to experience what it is like to live, eat and sleep in a space designed by an outstanding architectural practice”. Five such homes have so far been commissioned across the south of England and these are currently at various stages of completion. NORD’s completed building, coined Shingle House after the predominance of the material on the external envelope, forms a black silhouette against the wide, flat expanse of the shingle beach on which it sits. The house follows the form of the pre-existing house and outbuildings which occupied the site until recently. Dungeness is a place without walls or fences. It’s Britain’s only desert, a shingle wasteland punctuated by strange plants and even stranger human interventions. It is home to a peculiar assortment of buildings and activities, from tiny fishermen's huts to a giant nuclear power station by way of lighthouses and a miniature steam railway. Once considered the back of beyond, it was a place of squatter communities. Today it is borderline fashionable, a nature reserve and a conservation area. In this surreal landscape the silence is broken only by the changing patterns of the weather and the waves breaking on the shingle coastline.