The Grand Designs presenter said Jacob’s Ladder is the only house in Britain
that takes his breath away
Jacob’s Ladder was the staircase to heaven in the dream Jacob had as he fled
his brother Esau in the Book of Genesis. It is also the name of an
extraordinary house hidden among beechwoods on the Chiltern Hills, designed
and built at the beginning of this century. It stands on a steep slope where
the land falls away into Oxfordshire and it, too, is like something conjured
from sleep.
The house was designed by Niall McLaughlin in his late 30s and was his first
fully-fledged project. Since then Jacob’s Ladder has won an award from the
Royal Institute of British Architects, and McLaughlin’s reputation has
soared. He is now working on buildings for Oxford and Cambridge colleges,
retuning the
Natural History Museum , teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture,
and has a philosophical interest in housing for the elderly. Last year he
was named one of Britain’s 500 Most Influential People by Debrett’s.
The house is set in nine acres of woodland
Jacob’s Ladder, therefore, is acquiring a status far beyond its modest
beginnings. Kevin McCloud, no less, has given it the highest accolade.
“There is only one house I can think of in the whole country that takes
my breath away… This is how 21st-century rural houses should be designed,”
he said.
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Savills (LSE: SVS.L – news) is now bringing it to the market as a kind of three-dimensional
abstract work of art. It has four bedrooms, an indoor pool and more than
nine acres of beech and cherry. “I don’t think people will necessarily
realise that it is designed by a great architect,” says Sue Mailley of
Savills (01494 731950, savills.co.uk), who have priced it at £2.25 million.
“But they will see the photographs and think wow. It could be bought by a
weekender, or an older couple who want the cachet of a beautiful
contemporary home with sylvan views that can make you think you are miles
from civilisation.”
The original owners didn’t want curtains in the bedroom
The price tag is a multiple of what it cost to build for its original owners,
David and Shelley Grey. They had asked for something unassuming which would
“make a frame for the trees” and would be utterly different to their other
house, a perfect Georgian rectory. Very quickly critics began to admire it
for its “modesty, soul and beauty”.
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McLaughlin remembers its creation fondly. “It was hugely enjoyable and was at
some risk to the clients because I hadn’t completed a stand-alone building
before,” he says. The steepness of the site created difficulties which he
resolved by making the entrance at the top of the house, approached across a
small pedestrian bridge where the light could play on pools of water below.
It was a distant echo of a medieval drawbridge and moat. “It sits in a gap
in the trees and we felt like it was a window in the woods,” he says.
The double-height living room
Floors were made with beech from the surrounding trees, and decking was cut
from cedar and put together with huge expanses of steel and glass. “The
owners were keen on lots of glass and didn’t want curtains or blinds. They
said if they were seen stark naked in their bedroom or bathroom, then
whoever saw them was trespassing.” All the same McLaughlin made little
seating areas and cubby holes to withdraw to in the huge double-height
living room walled with glass.
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Jacob’s Ladder is all about the view and the indoor pool, which extends out
like a diving board through the tree canopy. “I used the view as a promise
which you keep glimpsing and coming back to,” he says. “When you get to the
pool you take your kit off and swim out into the view. I wanted the pool to
be lined in black tiles to reflect the trees and the light. In autumn when
you get that blaze of colour, the pool turns gold. In the summer it is
green.”
It’s all about the pool, which extends like a diving board into the trees
He has always loved the work of Mies van der Rohe, who designed Farnsworth
House in Illinois, a fragile glass villa on stilts, as a retreat for Edith
Farnsworth. They fell out and she complained that tourists took photographs
of her in her undies through the glass walls. The house was owned later by
the developer Peter Palumbo, who sold it to enthusiasts for $7.5 million. It
is now listed as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public.
McLaughlin was also hugely influenced by Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, a glass
cube hanging on the edge of a cliff above Los Angeles which is used
endlessly in films and fashion shoots, and is now listed as a Los Angeles
Cultural Monument and is on the Register of Historic Places.
His other inspiration was the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, which
is now a National Cultural Monument and central to Simon Mawer’s novel The
Glass Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2009. “The apse-like staircase
wrapped in sandblasted glass tips the cap to the Tugendhat House, so do the
spatial sequences which formed a very strong impression when I visited it,”
says McLaughlin.
Niall McLaughlin
“The open loggia with a view, followed by a small hall and staircase down to a
place where the real view opens up, is shared too.” But perhaps the most
extraordinary thing about Jacob’s Ladder is that it took only a week to
design.
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McLaughlin has since made other wonderful houses including one at Pipers End
in Hertfordshire, but his projects are an eclectic mix. He has, for
instance, put a new café on Deal pier in Kent, which is tenacious and
weatherproof as a limpet, and he is working on the massive Tapestry building
in Kings Cross, London.