Project: Cove Ridge House
Architecture: Coffey Architects
Contractor: We Are Ease
Environmental / M&E engineer: Hulley & Kirkwood
Structural engineer: Morph Structures
Location: Woolacombe, North Devon, United Kingdom
Area: 3445 ft2
Year: 2021
Photo Credits: Timothy Soar and Phil Coffey
Cove Ridge House is a 3,445 sqft home which sits within Woolacombe’s Sharpe Rock esplanade. It is a contemporary interpretation of the area’s whitewashed walls and slate roof vernacular that dots the hillside. The interior and exterior materials – white render, ash joinery, slate grey polished concrete, rough cast grey render and black slate – add depth and texture, whilst rooting the home in its geology.
From within and around the home, the landscape is played against the portrait. Oversized windows throughout, including an extra-large zenith skylight, side hung rooflights and house-width, full-height sliding glass doors create an ever-present inside/outside threshold and allow light to penetrate and the area’s spectacular views to open.
At Cove Ridge we started by thinking about how we could capture the views of the landscape and amplify our connections to it through openings in the building’s mass. We wanted the architecture to evoke the feeling of sitting in a cave looking out to sea, so we thought about those basic senses – feeling the light on your skin, hearing the waves crash and the wind howl. By imagining the building as a solid slate roof mass sitting on a continuous, protective white wall allowed us to carve out very particular ‘view finder’ openings that locate Woolacombe Beach and Baggy Point, the sky, the horizon and glimpses of the natural rock formations found on site.
Revealing the view from within
The key spaces in the house have been arranged around views to the surrounding landscape. The bedrooms to the east and west have views to the headlands at sun rise and sun set. The kitchen on the upper floor avails of panoramic views of the sea and the coastline. The Bay room on the ground floor has a framed view to Combesgate beach.
Complex thresholds / local vernacular
The house is a contemporary interpretation of the area’s white washed walls and slate roof vernacular. Its form hugs the existing hillside to minimise the exposed mass of the house, and there will be no intervention outside of the original home’s footprint. The exposure of the location and the views to and from the site in such a prominent position encouraged us to explore the depth and layering of walls, roofs and reveals creating an entirely site-specific response.
