The Houseboat

The site for The Houseboat, designed in Poole by Mole Architects, offers wonderful views over the heathland and to the bay beyond. Nestled within the pines, and with a long narrow approach, the site suggests a verticality, a reaching upwards. The house is designed as two hulls, upturned for shelter and sat upon a solid base. One side sits up higher, following the staggered section, but also negotiating the change of scale from the residential street to the high pine trees to the south.

  The form of the house, with its double-curve on plan, is designed to allow the volume within this context, and to shy away from the established street pattern and recede into the arc of the trees. It sits at the end of the suburban road, but connects strongly to wild heathland beyond. The Houseboat is tar-black, sitting on a weathered sea wall. The solid base is made from roughcast concrete, and contains the bedrooms, tightly packed as in the hold of a ship. The master bedroom sits on the entrance level, with further rooms a half-level down.

The hallway looks up to the light, and to the three-storey arch of concrete that holds up the house. Ascending from below the Plimsoll line, the living and dining areas are lofty and open, with a feeling of being “on deck”. Portal frames in Douglas fir support curved walls, so that the rooms widen as they rise up, and then narrow in to the western view. Inside it’s all taut curves and timber joinery, a mixture of rawness and finish. The truncated ends form tall elevations, closed at the front and open in a dramatic screen to the rear, with the weather for the fourth wall.

The Houseboat, Poole, UK
Program: single-family house
Architect: Mole Architects – Meredith Bowles, Ian Bramwell
Structural engineering: Sinclair Johnston & Partners
Cost consultant: Orbell Associates
Landscape designer: Coe Design
Area: 221 sqm
Completion: 2017