Casswell Bank Architects

Convivial and characterful garden studio for artists

Our first commission came through an open competition for young architects. The Garden Rooms project for Hauser & Wirth involved replacing an existing dilapidated outhouse with a new structure to provide spaces for the gallery’s artists in residence. The building offers two new spaces with their own distinct, spatial character and relationship to the garden.

The larger room is a robust and flexible space semi-open to the outside. It can be inhabited in various ways: as an external studio for making art in the open air; a pavilion for garden events; or as productive space for gardening. Figurative piers of timber columns with folding shutters and a single pitch roof address the more formal gardens and road linking Bruton with the Somerset countryside.

The ‘Cabinet’, a tiny room with finer finishes, has the atmosphere of a pub snug. It is an intimate space for writing or drawing. A desk and window built into one corner is just big enough for two people to sit together. The River Brue can be glimpsed through the secluded orchard garden of old fruit trees.

The little freestanding building is intentionally set apart from the existing serviced studios and intimately connected to the outside. It does not aim to be a perfect building, but an informal and friendly structure like an allotment shed or a writing hut. Familiar materials are brought together in unexpected ways: the expressed larch timber structure nods to a shed turned inside out; shifting fields of woven timber slats line the interior of the larger room; and a bias-cut corrugated cement sheet roof that follows the irregular geometry of the plan creates a frayed eave. A combination of controlled awkward moments with some special touches, such as turquoise steel feet and a bespoke oversized roof light, brings a convivial tension to the shelter.

SPECIFICATIONS

• Client: Hauser & Wirth
• Date: 2015-16
• Location: Bruton, Somerset  
• Collaborator: Timber construction developed with Tom Graham Workshop
• Photography: David Grandorge
• Reference Image Credit: Sigurd Lewerentz Chapel of Resurrection,
  photo The Swedish Museum of Architecture