Extras Perfect Pads: Oxfordshire

Date Published:

09/07/2008

Credit: David Grey

In the first of a series on his favourite houses, Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud pays a visit to the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside.

There are few new buildings in Britain that embody the happy meeting of client, architect and place. But this house is just such a one: a great piece of architecture that at the same time responds to its location with deference and self-effacing modesty.

Jacob’s Ladder (as David and Shelley’s home is called), sits on the scarp face of the Chiltern hills, in a wood overlooking the Oxford plain. It sits down on the site, on a platform carved into the slope, which means that you approach the house across a lightweight steel bridge.

When you arrive, the house presents itself as a wall of Douglas fir boards that is set off by the incidental addenda of boiler flues, handrails and edge details in stainless steel. That spicy combination of materials and colour (the orange-brown of the timber and the polished reflective steel) immediately sets up the big outdoor theme of this place: it serenely mirrors its setting.

Credit: David Grey

Credit: David Grey

Niall McLaughlin, the man responsible for this design, was not the first architect who David Grey sought. He was the thirteenth. That’s testament to someone who was determined to find the right man for the job and who rightly wanted to find in his architect a mutual bond of absolute trust. ‘We were giving this man all our money to play with, all our dreams and our future life here,’ explains David. ‘Of course there had to be a relationship of total trust.’