Flint House

Skene Catling de la Peña were asked to respond to a site in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor, an estate in Buckinghamshire, with a building now used for recipients of the Getty Rothschild Fellowship. The Flint House consists of three bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, library and study, with a self-contained annex studio, of 465 and 115 sqm respectively.

Located on a seam of chalk that extends from the White Cliffs of Dover through to Norfolk on the east coast of Britain, the building is treated as landscape or geological extrusion. Flint is an ancient material related to jasper, obsidian and onyx; a hard, cryptocrystalline form of quartz found only in chalk, and in abundance on the surface of the ploughed fields surrounding the site. The architecture was generated from this neolithic material, the geology and the immediate ecosystem.

The building is conceived materially as a flint landscape that has been carved away to become habitable. Wherever the main body has been cut or sculpted, such as the roof and balconies, the surface becomes terrazzo. The colour of the terrazzo is carefully graded to follow the progression of the flint, and its smooth vitreous quality echoes the natural waxiness of the flint. The flint was chosen for its rawness, to read like a Keifer painting of ash and lead, or the paint strokes of an Auerbach. The texture of the building answers the rough clods of ploughed earth in the surrounding fields. The flint is graded from a coarse, oily black, rusticated base to a refined fading out of smooth, matt chalk.