When country meets town: a unique family home in Cumbria
Not far from Hadrian’s Wall is the Cumbrian market town of Brampton, which Visit Lake District describes as ‘small, but…full of surprises’. Brampton recently added one more surprise to its roster, with a contextual modernist when a new-build home for a local family. The project designed by Mary Arnold-Forster Architects (MAFA) has been awarded the Dundee Institute of British Architects Ambassador Award and the prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) North West Award. Our low-carbon Scotlarch® cladding plays a vital role in the building’s success, supplying a modern finish that recalls the stable building that previously inhabited the plot.
A home in a hill
The foundation of Langdale’s design is its relationship to its location. The site is steep in parts, and the architect has used this to their advantage, embedding the building into the hillside with a lower floor of bedrooms. When viewing the home from the road, the upper floor appears as three simple single-storey buildings. One of these is a shed, and the other two are joined by a glass link which provides an entrance to the home via large sliding glass doors. This entrance storey contains all the reception rooms, arranged around a central square courtyard.
A masterclass in cohesive design
Langdale is located on the outskirts of Brampton, and MAFA wanted to reflect both the town and the countryside in the home’s finishes. A dry-stone wall separates the plot from the road and is built from reclaimed red sandstone, mirroring the material used in many of the town’s buildings. In contrast, the Scotlarch cladding used on the building links to the rolling farmland. In Arnold-Forster’s words, this careful choice of materials “bridges the junction between the agrarian landscape and the town.”
Delve deeply, and it’s clear that every detail of this building has been carefully conceived – creating a modern agricultural aesthetic from every angle. The larch reveals (known as ingos in Scotland) create a sleek, unbroken finish with the larch cladding. There is a huge seemingly unsupported corner window, concealed gutters and downpipes, grey aluminium sheeting on the shallow pitched roof, and indoors, exposed glulam pine roof trusses. As with a barn, the exterior door openings have a flush threshold, which, in a modern home such as this, translates into easy indoor/outdoor transitions.
A fabric-first approach
Our Scotlarch cladding was chosen for both its suitability for the Cumbrian countryside location and its sustainability credentials, as all of Langdale’s materials were selected to minimise the home’s carbon footprint. As Mary Arnold-Forster explains, the timber cladding “locks carbon within it, and because it is grown and processed in Scotland, haulage is kept to a minimum.” This was of utmost importance in a project that adopted a fabric-first strategy to prioritise a high level of energy efficiency and sustainability by focusing on materials, air tightness and insulation.
Made from the durable heartwood of Scottish larch, this characterful cladding has frequent knots. We source it from forests within a 100-mile radius of our sawmill, making it a planet-friendly choice, and it’s durable and cost-effective too. In ideal conditions, it weathers to a silvery grey.
In another example of attention to detail, Langdale’s roof, aluminium-clad window frames and flashings have been powder coated to match the colour the cladding will become once it has weathered.
Russwood were excellent as usual, always there to help with a technical query and delivered the materials on time to site.
Mary Arnold-Forster, Architect
Open rainscreen cladding fixed with screws and ventilation strips
MAFA specified the Scotlarch cladding in our RW014 profile, which is an open rainscreen profile. The ‘open’ refers to the fact that the boards are not butted up against one another but arranged with a small gap in between, which aids ventilation and creates a popular visual effect. The cladding acts as a rainscreen, or outer skin, protecting the building while being separated from the backing wall by a ventilation gap.
The use of our SIHGA L-GoFix® A2 stainless steel screws by SIBA Construction, the company responsible for building Langdale, creates neat detailing, and our KompeFix® ventilation strips offset the cladding from the battens and prevent moisture trapping. These choices maximise the longevity of this cladding.
Specifier Tip: KompeFix® compensates for the natural seasonal movement of timber cladding and decking. The result is optimal stability and enhanced durability.
A design triumph and a family home for the future
MAFA’s brief was to design a home that balances simple practicality with an appreciation of its wild and beautiful setting. Langdale is an energy-efficient home with incredible views, beautiful indoor and outdoor spaces, and plenty of room for what the RIBA jury referred to as the “stuff of life – storage, shoes and coats”. For the family of four that have moved in, it’s this functionality – combined with its attractiveness – that will make Langdale feel like home.
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Russwood’s Scotlarch® is a sustainable, durable and cost-effective cladding solution.
