Denizen Works has followed up its award-winning House No. 7 with a second prototype home based on a ‘found’ ruin embedded in the rugged landscape of Tiree

18 August 2022 · By Gordon Murray, Photography by Gilbert McCarragher

Mannal House, on the island of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides, is a new family home for a couple and their three children, designed for a stunning site with 180° views out to sea over the Treshnish Isles and to the mainland beyond. Having spent a number of years living in a forest in Canada, the client was keen to maintain a close connection to nature.

The island of Tiree lies 56°N, on the same latitude as some of Sweden’s Baltic islands, but the Gulf Stream, egged on by the North Atlantic Drift, ensures that the western archipelago of Scotland bathes in warmer waters. A fertile sand and shingle topsoil mix forms a productive machar, or grassland plain, across the island. It is flat but it gets a lot of sunshine. The highest point (in the south) is only 141m above sea level and the prevailing westerly winds blow across it with little interruption. This is offshore wind farm country.

Due to its topography and its location on the edge of the North Atlantic, Tiree became strategically important during the 1940s and an airstrip was constructed there, first for aircraft on convoy protection duty in the Second World War, then as a base for submarine hunting in the Cold War era. By 1944 there were 2,500 servicemen and women stationed there, with a correspondingly large domestic support population. Since the 1950s a steady decline in numbers has levelled off at about 650 locals, plus a busy summer influx supporting tourism to what has become a world windsurfing championships venue.   

The post-war decline left a legacy of abandoned or part-used structures across the island. Many have been renewed, extended or simply inhabited. Denizen Works’ House No. 7 for the architects’ parents, winner of the 2014 Grand Designs Award for Britain’s best home, is an idiosyncratic example which, like Mannal House, draws on the local vernacular – the blackhouse in particular – for inspiration.

This kind of adaptation to revive a ruin is a popular and ultimately sustainable approach, perhaps more so here than on, say, Skye or Islay, where Scottish Government-led stimulation, alongside a burgeoning malt whisky economy, has boosted the formation of new settlements, which are built with a limited architectural palette. The comparative shortage of labour and materials on Tiree has fostered a beachcomber-type approach to construction and the most robust of ‘found’ materials and structures have clung on and become embedded in hearth and home.

Mannal House sits at the end of a small settlement, barely a hamlet, of similarly robust structures. Often these become half-buried in the machar. Denizen Works’ quasi-archaeological dig on House No. 7 is a fine example of how weather-protected external spaces can be created while stimulating interesting spatial interchanges internally. Mannal House achieves something similar within the existing rubble walls of an old byre, which root the building to an otherwise fragile edge just above the shoreline, in some weather conditions even holding back the surf.

The house is entered through this rubble structure, which forms an open but sheltered courtyard that shields then reveals the new building. Beyond, simply fenestrated cellular accommodation for guests and children in a low, single-storey white rendered box with a red corrugated metal roof in a low pitch catches the morning sun. Internally, the curved ceiling along its length suggests a re-used railway carriage. The feel is utilitarian and redolent of pre-war Ministry of Defence structures that still pepper Scotland’s rural landscape.

Another consequence of living at this high latitude is the low angle of sunlight, even in midsummer. Bouncing off the surface of the sea, it creates a wonderful horizontal illuminance, in which gables are sometimes bathed in a distant sunlight while the remainder of the building is under a grey sky.

Passing though the courtyard, reception and circulation space at Mannal House, one enters the double-height volume of a long room, where control of this horizontal light transforms the space. In contrast with the single-storey, flat-roof functionality of the cellular accommodation, which presents a long elevation to the sea, this room is a framed structure of laminated timber portals running at right angles to the shore and thus presenting a glazed gable with views east across the water.

The frame construction also permits views up and down the coast through its flanks. The height of the glass opening matches the scale of the stone byre and is deliberately kept low to frame these views.

Picking up another element of the vernacular, the upper half of this volume is wrapped in the tarred seamless roofing felt  found now on many traditional blackhouses. This appears to hover over the glazed walls below, then appears to pull apart like a matchbox from its drawer. The black roof is punctured by a huge dormer window looking out from the master bedroom  south to Hynish and its lighthouse, and by specifically located smaller openings to frame points in the landscape on the mainland.

The particular choice of angular geometry for the form of the long house is in contrast with the softer forms of House No. 7, yet still places the building very much in its time and context. Internally, the horizontal natural light illuminates the whole, as if one were on Cape Cod, and the house adopts the bleached pallor of driftwood in its joinery and flooring, with all other surfaces white. Externally, with its opaque black skin and transparent glazing, the form is almost shocking in its contrast with the Georgian house that abuts the site.

In his fine book The Highland House Transformed (Dundee University Press, 2009), Daniel Maudlin acknowledges such polarity in ‘the 19th century building boom of new, modern houses designed to demonstrate that a new Scottish Highlands, improving and prosperous, had emerged out of the political turmoil of the mid-18th century to take its place within the wider economy of early modern Britain. Design history has largely ignored small everyday classical buildings – anonymous and uncomplicated. Small buildings offer the opportunity to establish a new relationship between architecture and social and economic history.’

On Tiree these two juxtaposed buildings are at either end of the spectrum Maudlin described. The formality and rationalism of the earlier building anticipated a modernism, whereas the new structure adheres to the vernacular of the farmstead. This typology is well documented in John Brennan’s Scotland’s Rural Home (Lund Humphries Publishers, 2021). But there is also a richness in the ‘modern’ rational highland house and its lineage – which has yet to be fully explored – where the typology of the Scottish Renaissance House as defined by McKean has not yet been interpreted as precedent. That self-confidence in architectural response requires a more robust local economy.

Denizen Works performs a welcome recalibration of our design compass in moving away from zinc and slatted softwoods as dominant materials (with the byre as the dominant form) with its intelligent take on context explored in these houses on Tiree. This is the second in a series of three Denizen Works projects on the island. The first, House No. 7, is featured in Brennan’s book. Mannal House, the second, had been mothballed during the two years of the Covid pandemic and is now completing. The third has a site but is, as yet, no more than sketches.

In these prototype projects, director Murray Kerr and Denizen Works are also gaining a strong credibility with their unique interpretation of climate and history, the drivers between the physics of topography and the metaphysics of place – the ley lines which define the underlying context of the settlement. Theirs is an individual voice being recognised in several new commissions. Gordon Murray is visiting professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Strathclyde and principal of research and design consultancy Gordon Murray Architect

The house represents a first step in Denizen Works’ move to create bespoke but economic homes. Working with Scotframe, we created a SIPs house that responds to its site but was quick to erect using local trades.

As with all of our projects, we looked to respond to the existing site and, through the development of a series of options, we decided with our clients that the proposal should sit within the walls of the ruined byre that is on the northern edge of the site.

Buildings on Tiree are generally built with blank gables facing the oncoming wind from the sea and the existing byre was no exception. This led us to explore the possibility of inhabiting the form, but expressing the gable another way.

On approaching the house from the road to the north you enter through a courtyard by way of a stone gable and the culmination of proceeding through the building is a glass gable of the same dimensions, framing views of the sea and giving our clients the feeling of living on the prow of a ship. Murray Kerr, director, Denizen Works

Mannal House has been delivered using a ‘fabric first’ approach. Building in timber allowed us to achieve a high-performance building envelope, due to its thermally efficient airtight structure. The timber frame also ensured low embodied carbon in the house while delivering reduced energy consumption, again due to its thermal performance. Scotframe

Working with Scotframe was a great experience and one through which we have learned a great deal about SIPs construction to help create economic, quick-to-build and cheap-to-heat homes.

Together we developed a simple set of construction rules for the two wings of Mannal House, where the east-facing bedroom wing is a SIPs kit sitting on a blockwork base and the main living space is characterised by glulam portal frames. These are about 60 per cent oversized in terms of required structural strength but give the living space a real sense of scale and solidity, reminding our clients of the interiors of west of Scotland Presbyterian churches.

The rest of the house is economic in construction, timber floors and painted plasterboard being our client’s preferred finishes. Andrew Ingham, director, Denizen Works

Start on site:  February 2018 Completion:  February 2022 Gross internal floor area:  278m² Construction cost: approx £700,000 Construction cost per m²:  £2,518.00 Architect: Denizen Works Client:  Private Structural engineer: Cameron + Ross Principal designer: Denizen Works Approved building inspector: Argyll and Bute Council Main contractor: John Mackinnon CAD software used: AutoCAD

Tags Denizen Works House Tiree

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