Galvanized steel cladding sits above the red grandis glazing surrounds
An ambitious extension and refurb has opened up a gloomy hillside house, turning it into a light-filled home that anchors new timber buildings onto its steep slope.
The house on Millwood Road had been vacant for four or five years. Built on a steep hillside, it was uninviting and beset with a lot of problems. But Simon Basey, a property developer with a family connection to the Hastings area, could see potential, and bought it. Having been living abroad, he had returned to the UK during Covid, and had been drawn back to Hastings where he had family connections.
“In the old living room, they used to keep the net curtains closed all the time – mainly because the view outside was so grim,” recalls Hugh Strange, the project’s architect. “There were steep stepped areas with precarious makeshift structures, scaffolding and sheds that were dangerous.”
While the front of the house looked out towards the town, the back had a 1980s extension which closed off the house from the garden. The steep garden area behind the house had promise for extensions to built – but it would be quite a challenge.
Rethinking the flow of the existing house
In transforming the property, Hugh opted to leave the front part of the house alone more or less. It was well-proportioned: an entrance hall, with two good-sized rooms off it. But there was previously no flow to the arrangement of the house and its outbuildings.
“We demolished the makeshift structures, and we built a new gallery structure, seating area and a study that changes the way that the outside space is experienced. We opened up the rear, made connections, and it now feels like there’s light coming into the back of the house.”
Opening an existing wall allowed passage from the dining room to the kitchen; while the new gallery space enables people to thread their way from inside to out and back in again. The house has been given a new coherence.
The existing retaining walls required significant strengthening and the use of anchor drills.
A challenging site
“Once we cleared the makeshift structures, we realised the ground was not stable enough to support any new building,” Hugh explains.
“Parts of it were collapsing and we discussed whether a large-scale demolition would be appropriate, reforming the terraces in concrete. But between the engineer, the client and myself, we didn’t want the financial or environmental cost of pouring huge amounts of concrete into the hillside.”
It was decided to leave the repaired retaining walls rough and ready, in contrast to the smart, clean lines of the new structures.
“The site was not promising,” says Charlotte Garven, Associate at Price & Myers, the project’s structural engineers. “The slope is very steep indeed – over the course of the garden it is a three-storey elevation. And it was completely unclear at all what was holding anything up and where everything was going.”
The retaining walls would be integral to the project’s success. “Clearly they needed strengthening works,” Charlotte says. “But the key decision in the whole project was about not trying to make them really clean and precise; and we needed to minimize any extra load.”
Careful, piecemeal repair work
They opted for piecemeal repair. Anchor drills were inserted in each of the steep terraces: core-drilling deep into the hillside at an angle, with steel anchors which tie the terrace back into the hillside.
“We did do some limited site investigation, to confirm that the ground anchors would be viable,” Charlotte tells us. “These are normally used in the side of railway embankments and big civil engineering projects: it’s quite unusual for them to be in a domestic project.”
There are also areas where new concrete was patched over old bit and, in some areas that were very bad, some underpinning. Instead of painting it or covering it all in render, it was left as it was: leaving visible its patchwork character of old and new, with features such as a staircase built into a small retaining wall.
Model showing the layout of the main building extension and gallery, together with the new terrace structures, and the staircases that access them.
A lightweight solution
Building on top of the repaired retaining walls still required any structures to be lightweight – so timber was the obvious choice. “We had also already worked with Hugh on a number of different timber projects – CLT, LVL and Douglas Fir – and have got to know how he likes to detail and his style of architecture,” Charlotte explains.
The extensions were built in Kerto LVL, supplied by Metsa Wood UK. They step up the hill, but are also slightly stepped in plan as well, producing a pleasingly dislocated sense of space. In between the extensions and the staircases that thread up the terraces, there is a new central space, a clearing in the middle that the house is now oriented around.
The LVL structure
The LVL (laminated veneer lumber) comes in 50mm thick panels; the beams were made from two LVL panels with a spacer in between them, making each beam 150mm thick in total. “Typically, LVL structures are connected together with metal plates and lots of nails, which often results in little shadow gaps,” Hugh says.
“We wanted to marry this contemporary material with an older form of carpentry, where a post visibly supports a beam and a deep beam is notched to support a shallow beam, where elements are supported by sitting on top of each other, supporting each other. It provides a real sense of visible support, which I enjoy architecturally.”
“All the connections are simple and straightforward,” Charlotte explains. “we have a series of large perimeter beams that act as the structural beams, but also as the parapets. They’re performing a few different functions at once. Wherever possible, we’ve used double or triple sections that then can fit neatly with the column details, which are, again, a series of three members. Everything stacks and can connect.”
The new layout brings much more light into the main house.
“Most of the timber is in-bearing, which is quite a traditional method for timber connections. The design is essentially that the beams are all notched; the joists slot over and it is restrained laterally. It’s simple and efficient engineering. Hidden connectors were used sparingly, only where needed for buildability.”
This drive to minimise plates and nail fixings – to sit one LVL beam on another, then bolt the joints – allowed the client to pitch in and help put it together alongside local non-specialist contractor. It also facilitates reuse: the LVL structure can be taken apart more easily because each junction does not have a plethora of nails to remove.
Choosing sympathetic materials
The LVL also blends nicely with other timber used across the project. The windows and doors were built in red grandis – a fast-growing eucalyptus – by Dagenham-based subcontractor K&D, while another subcontractor, Jones Neville, did all the internal joinery in cherry. The exteriors are either clad in galvanized steel (at the top) or in the red grandis that surrounds the sliding doors and glazing; and occasionally in concrete in the case of the structures set into retaining wall or an extended existing wall. The red grandis is treated with a protective finish that is semi-translucent to reveal the grain of the timber.
Internal joinery was made from cherry
“We deliberately tonally matched the cherry and the red grandis – there are very close in colour,” Hugh says. “The LVL is fundamentally spruce; and we’ve also used spruce plywood. So the non-structural timber is a nice red while the structural timber is a little paler.”
The ceilings of the buildings are all plywood. All three of the new roofs are green roofs; while a series of planters were also built up the hillside. “The combination of green roofs and planters has created much more absorbent ground than previously: some of the repairs to the terraces have allowed us to direct rainwater towards the plants.”
A house that makes sense of its site
“The house now turns towards the back instead of away from it and the different buildings make the most of the stepping-up levels of the hillside,” Hugh states. “The new route that we’ve given the house threads through new and repaired works to a central space onto which the three new structures all look. The top terrace looks down upon the building and, finally, you reach the road at the top. The enjoyment of the grain of the repaired hillside – that’s a huge part of what the project’s about.”
Many thanks to Hugh Strange (Hugh Strange Architects) and Charlotte Garven (Price & Myers)
