Cabin House: Bringing the Outside In
A new deck doubling as bin and bike storage below a large window opening.
Bringing the outside in..
it might look quintessentially cute, but opening the front door was like entering a dark cell. The front window opened into a porch with a door on the other side the living room was in darkness!
The interior of this house was best described as a shack! There was no garden as such, just a dirty dumping ground, and the side of the house was an arm’s distance from the neighbour so although detached, it felt very closed-in. The house was unusual in that the street was a single row of houses with fronts that looked out over the large back gardens of the parallel avenue.
It was quiet and leafy, we just needed to exploit that connection.
With a modest budget of £15k we made some bold decisions to open the house front and back, to access as much light as possible by adding big windows.
After the initial window opening it was a priority to add green views wherever possible. On the side of the house we found a shade-loving creeper that quickly occupied the fence outside the kitchen and the side of the house. That transformed the view and the feeling in the kitchen and in the lower bedroom.
We landscaped the tiny backyard, with cobblestones arranged in an organic curve to lead the eye through the space and added a border with fruit trees fruit and garden furniture.
The extended deck was completely made of reclaimed Douglas fir timber flooring, found abandoned in an alleyway on the main road below. We got it free - never be afraid to ask! With this we were able to extend the front of the house into a full-length deck with a frame for a removable canopy for shade. There was space to grow tomatoes and have somewhere to sit in the morning sun and enjoy the view of back gardens’ borrowed landscape. We also created a useful storage for bins and bikes below.
The house was simply furnished with a mix of street finds and coveted special bits of classic furniture. An old armchair was rescued from a Starbucks revamp - I happened to be sitting on it when they came to replace it! An old post table from a derelict post office was refinished. Multiple abandoned street futon bases became perfect bed bases and inspired the day bed crash zone for the basement. Wooden pallets were turned into picture frames.
