A cradle of ruins for modern home
Scottish country residence rises from 200-year-old fallen stones,
The contrast is startling: a minimalist, pitched roof rising from the ruins of an 18th-century stone farmhouse.
Aptly named Ruin Studio, the home near Dumfries, Scotland — about 120 kilometres south of Glasgow — is again startling on the inside with a third architectural style: a free-form doublecurved internal surface.
Architect and owner Lily Jencks (in collaboration with Nathanael Dorent Architecture) used the eroding structure, built in the 1700s, as a frame for the black, waterproof, pitched-roof new build. Inside, the rounded interior tube wall system is infilled with polystyrene and covered in glass-fibre reinforced plastic.
Curves dominate the bedroom and living areas of Ruin Studio, with circular windows and skylights, along undulating walls. The kitchen and dining areas of the home offer yet another contrast, with their angular design. Large rectangular windows look northward across a pair of remote valleys.
A portion of the original wall intrudes into the 1,937-square-foot home, dividing the kitchen and living areas. Open bookshelves add to its eclectic feel.
The Ruins runs on a near passivhaus standard of ultra-low ecological footprint with a high level of insulation and the use of solar energy.
Completed in 2016, it took three years to design and build, and was completed in 2016.
Jencks, with Lily Jencks Studio in London, answers a few questions about her home, Ruin Studio: Why did you use the ruins in the design of the home?
One of the beauties of it was the existing walls of the farmhouse, and to think that people had been occupying the site for many years, it seemed kind of wonderful to live amongst them in some way. How did you come up with the design?
It was digitally modelled in 3D on the computer. Then we found a way to fabricate it, taking that digital model and cutting some of it by computer and other bits with a chain saw. It was very high-tech — and very low-tech. The bookshelf area is done as if it has been pulled through the structure.
There must have been challenges in the design and construction. What were they?
Designing this curving surface was a really complicated thing to describe to a builder. We built quite a few mock-ups to see how it would feel to inhabit it and talked to different builders about how they would build it. In the end we, went to a prop company who could build all the curves for us. I’d say we got it about 70-to-80 per cent in the digital realm.
But then when you build something and stand in it, you do have to make a few tweaks. One of their guys took out his chainsaw and cut off extra bits in a weird shape underneath the shower, for example. What do the ruins achieve in your design?
There’s a really beautiful life that happens in the stones — particularly offset with the black EPDM rubber on the outside. It is a design of contrasts. It has the very smooth white curving interior, and the great black exterior, and the rough rocky natural materials.
There’s one moment in the house where the rock comes into the house. Those were existing walls we just built around. You really see the contrasts between the neutral material and the white man-made material. What’s it like to live there? It’s really lovely. One of the things I didn’t know when designing it is that the way the curves use light is very different from the way straight walls use light. They bounce and reflect light, particularly in Scotland, because we are quite far north.
On a very long summer day, you get different coloured light than you have in the winter — and much warmer. The late evening light is a particular colour. Because the curves bounce and kind of stretch light, you see all of the colours of the light in a way I’ve never experienced.
It has really beautiful views to the north — lots of weather can happen in a day.