Rodic Davidson North Vat featured on Grand Designs

Our beach house in Dungeness, North Vat, has been long-listed for the RIBA House of the Year 2016 and will be featured on Grand Designs House of the Year on Channel 4, Thursday 8th December 2016 at 9pm.

North Vat, completed in 2015 won an RIBA South East Regional Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the 2016 Manser Medal.

North Vat replaces an existing fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness’s unique shingle landscape. The house was conceived as a ‘cluster’ of small shed-like structures, referential to the local vernacular of pitched roof huts, scattered along the beach front.

The plan form of the proposed cluster was derived from the locations of the existing sheds and cottage, minimally adjusted to provide a simple living layout whilst maintaining a low impact on the ground ecology and sustaining the sense of randomness that we found in the original buildings.

The windows and roof lights of North Vat were conceived as ‘paintings’. They have been arranged around moments of pause within the plan to frame particular views and to track the movement of sunlight which radically transforms the spaces during the day.  At night, the black clad building disappears and its presence is only revealed by these frames of interior life.

Siniša Rodić commented “The existing sheds and cottage were clad in black timber. We felt that the site’s contribution to the larger scale assembly of black buildings and clusters was important to retain. There is a sense of a bigger project taking place in Dungeness which we felt we were contributing to. Our piece was about the inherent beauty of simple ‘elemental’ forms and how these can create complex spaces and experiences within a cluster.. All architectural clutter was removed in favour of creating an almost abstract form”.

North Vat, was featured as a Building Study in the Architects Journal (27th November 2015)