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Printmakers House


Located just outside of York, this new-build house and accompanying studio building takes cues from its rural surroundings.


Location: York
Typology: Residential
Client: Private
Size: 200 sqm (house + studio)
Scope: Architectural services, RIBA 1-5

The house offers space to dwell, while the accompanying studio provides a separate working environment. Both buildings take on simple pitched roof forms and share a material palette, sitting as a pair in the rural landscape.


From a picturesque, secluded garden attached to an existing house, the site offers expansive views across the greenbelt that surrounds the city of York. In response to this, we positioned new buildings so the surrounding landscape could take on different characteristics: a new formal courtyard garden connects the buildings while a more wild, meadow-like landscape lie beyond the studio.




Beginning with a simple pitched form, voids create covered external spaces that enhance a connection with the landscape. These spaces take on functional outdoor uses, serving as an entrance porch, a dining terrace, and bedroom terraces, the latter of which enjoys generous amounts of sun in the mornings. 




The buildings’ material palette responds to local rural architecture, while also offering a refined sense of contemporary domestic dwelling through certain details. Buildings are clad in gabions containing local York stone while windows are framed with timber and corrugated metal is used for the roof.





In plan, the house is compact and arranged to maximize views from different spaces to the changing landscape outside. Bedrooms towards the north-east enjoy vistas of the greenbelt and morning sun, with living spaces arranged to look into a new courtyard.