Landart House

Building in a greenfield site is always a planning challenge but there exists a loophole whereby a proposal, if it is considered to be of exceptional architectural quality, can be approved. It was through this means that we gained approval for ‘Landart House’ – a fusion of landscape art and inhabited building which was the outcome of a collaboration between the artist Kate Whiteford and Hugh Cullum Architects.

The site is a large plot of land in a village on the outskirts of Huntingdon. The landscape will be sculpted with waves of grass and ridges of earth reminiscent of ridge and furrow agriculture. In its centre rises a large mound on which Whiteford has created a white land drawing. The house is folded into this extraordinary landscape and its long white roof floats over the land drawing, as the culmination of the series of white lines that Whiteford has etched into the surface of the mound.

The house is simply arranged under the dominant roof as a living platform, with perimeter glazing, suspended over a ground level pool.

Initially, our clients had asked us simply to design a further extension to their existing listed house, a converted nineteenth century cricket pavilion in the corner of the large site, to which a series of undistinguished extensions had been added piecemeal over the previous fifty years or so. However, we took the opportunity to suggest the complete removal of all these previous extensions and their replacement by a semi-subterranean extension which would be much less damaging to the historic setting of the original cricket pavilion. Having suggested this heritage gain and the careful restoration of the pavilion, we proposed that the planners might be open to permitting the construction of completely new additional house elsewhere on the site. Our clients were excited by this prospect and commissioned us to seek permission.

One of our key strategies was to make the new house and its landscape setting complement and enhance the existing listed cricket pavilion. This aim was elegantly achieved by the land art, which picked up on themes of cricketing and the landed gentry thereby giving depth to the cultural meaning of the heritage artefact. It was this strategy that really won over the planning committee, so much so that one of the conditions of their permission was that our proposed viewing tower, from which the entire ensemble could be viewed, was to be open to the public for four weekends every year.

The Councillors on the planning committee voted almost unanimously in favour of our proposals and went out of their way to praise its innovative and exciting approach.

The earth for the mound sculpture is on site waiting to be modelled and the new extension to the CRICKET PAVILION was completed in 2023.

Architect – Hugh Cullum Architects

Artist – Kate Whiteford OBE RSA

Walnut model realised by Tom Aylwin