About
Working with one of our existing clients, we were asked to design a beach house for two families on an idyllic stretch of beach in the Caribbean. Much of the architecture on the Cay flicks chaotically between mock colonial and suburban Americana, but behind the layers, the true local architecture is something more charismatic and engaging.
This beach house has a split personality; it is both a holiday home to our client and a rental property to local fishermen and their families in the off-season. But it is also a sensitive re-interpretation of the local vernacular, a contemporary reimagining of the timber beach house through the eyes of a London family.
The house turns itself entirely towards the sea. A wide double height living space spills out onto a terrace held under the eaves of the main building. Balconies are cut into the simplified volumes of the bedroom wings that flank the main space. Materiality is a pared back and simplified palette of local materials re-assembled in a contemporary form.
Our insight
I love new buildings. From the analysis of the site and understanding its innate parameters to dissecting the client brief.
So too it is on existing buildings, but there a special playfulness that comes from working with objects as well as spaces. Here the careful composition of four sheds into a series of inhabited spaces is just joyful.
From the owners
“Rod was given a brief to create a modern five bedroom house overlooking the ocean, using the views as the focal point. He created a contemporary house full of double volume rooms, with full height glass doors across the building. His designs use materials that blended in sympathetically with the surroundings. The product has a special wow factor. The design is now being copied in the area which is testament to Rod and his team’s designs.”