A community building with heart, The Apple House features hemp, lime plaster, spruce glulam and an earthen floor – all with a respectful outlook to the surrounding orchard.
The Apple House sits in an orchard on the edge of Hertfordshire’s Metropolitan Green Belt, a protected landscape that doesn’t give out building permits easily. The site sits within Serge Hill, a stretch of land long associated with the work of landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, and the building exists because of a project his wife, the psychotherapist and author Sue Stuart-Smith, began in 2017.
The Orchard Project was an attempt to test, in built form, the idea that working with nature can change what people are capable of, and that gardening might be a form of community infrastructure. The Apple House is its life-size case study and permanent, new home designed by Okra, a young multi-disciplinary practice founded by Ben Stuart-Smith, the son of the Stuart-Smith’s.
The building is small – 150 square metres – and it does several things at once: a workshop space, a teaching room, a meeting space for school groups, a venue for talks and dinners, a base for the local charity Sunnyside Rural Trust, which runs a propagation unit on the site for adults with learning disabilities. The brief asked for a building that would adapt to all of this, year round, while sitting comfortably enough to not detract from the orchard itself.
The aesthetic was not the goal of the process, but it's the result of it: a building that looks of its place because it is, materially, of its place.
Materially, the Apple House is almost entirely natural. The structure is a sequence of spruce glulam portal frames, designed with the engineers’ Structure Workshop, and connected not with a ridge beam or purlins but with sheets of birch ply that sheath the inside of the roof. It makes for an open volume in which the structural logic is visible from anywhere in the room – the bays of the portal frame are read in sequence, the ply between them taut and continuous, the whole roof working as a stressed skin rather than a stack of components.
Between the frames, hempcrete has been cast in place. Hempcrete, which is made from the woody core of the hemp plant mixed with lime and water, sequesters carbon as it cures and continues to do so for decades; it is also a hygroscopic insulator, buffering the interior against humidity and temperature swings. In this building it does a third job. Cast tightly between the spruce frames, it stiffens them – helping to make the wall more structural.
The floor is the project’s most radical move. Working with natural-materials specialist Will Stanwix and the local brickmaker H.G Mathews, Okra developed an earthen floor from a clay product called strock, normally used as a walling brick. The bricks were cut in two, laid as tiles, and sealed with a pigmented linseed oil that draws the warm tones out of the unfired clay rather than masking them. The floor was hand-laid and hand-finished. It’s also, in cost terms, dramatically less expensive than most alternatives.
Outside, the building is clad in cleft oak. The oak was harvested on site, from trees in overcrowded positions that needed thinning, and processed by hand to dimensions that the team could work without machinery. The cladding is irregular – wavy, slightly rough, no two boards quite alike – and it has weathered to a soft grey since installation. Bats and insects have taken up residence in the gaps. The aesthetic was not the goal of the process, but it is the result of it: a building that looks of its place because it is, materially, of its place.
Inside, the spruce, ply, lime plaster and clay floor produce a room that is warm, slightly variable, and subdued in the way that buildings made from breathable materials tend to be. Light comes in through generous openings on three sides, framing the woodland to the south, the vegetable garden to the east and Tom Stuart-Smith’s plant library – more than two thousand herbaceous varieties – to the west. The borrowed landscape of the orchard adds inviting, natural viewpoints.
The Apple House is a building made with a coherent argument about materials, in a place where the argument can be tested for years against the bodies of the people using it.
Project credits
Architecture – Okra
Photography – Nick Dearden
Builder – Slabside Construction
Structural engineer – Structure Workshop
Landscape architecture – Tom Stuart-Smith Studio
Hemp – Hemp Block Company
Strock floor – H G Mathews
Windows – Dask Timber
