Cross House

A single house planned around a load-bearing cross

Field: Private Residential
Setting: Rural edge condition
Scale: Study of a single dwelling
Status: Design research

Minimal domestic interior with a plaster wall and a single deep window

Reference imagery: licensed photography of the built environment, not studio work

Statement

Four rooms arranged around a cruciform of load-bearing walls, each opening to a different orientation. The plan is fixed; the inhabitation is not. Rooms are deliberately of similar size so their use can migrate over decades.

01. Plan

Non-hierarchical rooms of roughly equal proportion, each with two openings. A house designed this way has no permanent living room and no permanent bedroom, only rooms that face north, east, south and west, and a family that moves between them.

Simple domestic room with white walls and a timber floor — Cross House, plan

02. Threshold

The walls thicken at every opening to make a seat, a store or a step. These thickenings are the whole of the detailing budget, concentrated at the few places a hand or a body meets the building.

Kitchen with plain cabinetry and a window onto planting — Cross House, threshold

03. Ground

The house sits on a low plinth rather than cutting into the slope, so the ground continues underneath it and drainage is unaltered. Landscape work is limited to what the excavation itself produces.