Pod life.

A new house buried in the ground renders itself almost invisible, only turning a glass eye on the sea in a remote part of Wales.

Entranced by the beauty of the remote Pembrokeshire coast, the clients of Future Systems' new house had been spending holidays on the site for many years, camping in a rough shed. The existence of the shed and the extreme discretion of the architects' proposal for the same spot won planning permission in a National Park. There are only two other buildings in the immediate neighbourhood, a short drive from the town of Haverfordwest: about half a mile away along the coast to the south there is a small hotel; in the other direction, on the coastal road running north towards St Davids, stands an isolated and ancient bungalow.

Future Systems' response to the sensitivity of the site was to bury the house, devising an organic, structurally strong form and making it an almost invisible part of the landscape. The oval envelope was built into a sloping cleft. Turfed and planted with local varieties of flowers and grasses, the roof mound looks prehistoric in the otherwise untouched terrain. There are no discernible boundary lines or garden confines; from above and from north and south the building cannot be seen. Only the chimney of a woodburning stove projects like a periscope above the ground.

On the east, and just visible from the road, a V-shaped cleft cut into the mound admits a glass wall and main entrance to the house. The intention is eventually to obscure the entrance with a belt of trees. On the opposite side, the west wall, settling into the contours of the site and fringed with vegetation, is a glass eye on the sea. Gently curved, it is defined by a slender stainless steel frame and pierced by porthole windows.

As the clients requested, the house enables them to make the most of the views and gives them an interior as open and informal as possible. The structure eliminated the need for internal columns. A simple ring of spread foundations and solid floor slab is of reinforced and mass concrete with the back retaining wall of dense masonry using the curve of the plan and light steel reinforcement for stability. Everything that is in contact with the ground is an earth material; cement and blockwork are based on pozzolanic (volcanically derived) substances.

Under its covering of turf, the roof is a development of the plywood skin structures devised by the Swedish Timber Association in the 1970s to make efficient use of timber products. Using the minimal amount of material, it consists of a single plywood shell which is doubly curved and supported by a lightweight ring beam of tubular steel rolled to follow the plan of the roof. Since most of the envelope is buried, the building is naturally insulated and internal temperatures remain relatively even. The cross section presents little obstacle to the air flowing over the cliff and this prevents excessive cooling, while even on the most sunlit day, the plan is deep enough to ensure the interior remains cool. The house is electrically powered and has underfloor heating.

Luminance is an active element of the architecture, as changing light playing across the panorama outside is admitted through the transparent walls on the east and, to a greater extent, on the west. At the heart of the house, the wood-burning stove has a circular hearth marked out by the line of the architects' curved sofa. Seated here, you can, without moving, look across the luminous bay to St David's Head and beyond to the oil tankers, like toys far out to sea, plying to and from the nearby port of Milford Haven.

Two free-standing prefabricated pods, shaped on plan like teardrops, define the edges of the living space and stop short of the ceiling so as not to disrupt appreciation of the volume and play of light through the house. The pods house the kitchen and the bath/shower rooms serving the bedrooms beyond.

Colours inside the house are brilliant: a yellow which in season echoes the flowers of the gorse on the hills outside, dark blue and white. Set against the subtle colours and climatic nuances of the Pembrokeshire coast they negate any sense of the subterranean and sharpen the softness of curving walls and ceiling.

Architects Future Systems

Structural engineer Teckniker

Services engineer BDSP 

Photographs Richard Davies