The New House, including orangery, Millennium Pavilion, terraces and all hard landscaping by John Outram Associates

The New House is a country house designed by John Outram Associates between 1978 and 1981 and built from 1982 to 1986, with subsequent additions and alterations by the same practice in the late 1980s, 1999 and 2007.

Construction and Materials

The house has a steel frame clad in horizontal bands of brick and travertine, organised into vertical bays by concrete-clad piers. These piers are hollow, containing services accessible from within the house, and are composed of three distinct sections. At the base is exposed pebble aggregate with a narrow smooth-faced band, its surface acid-etched to reveal crushed limestone. The main body of each pier uses crushed bricks of different colours set in mortar, creating a terrazzo-like material which Outram terms 'blitzcrete'. The capitals are cast lacquer-coated concrete with black marble aggregate, appearing as spheres within cubes. The convex circular projections contain lights and act as rainwater overflows.

The glazing is set in deep-sectioned timber frames. Some bays are fully glazed, while doors and windows are subdivided by heavy mullions and transoms that are flat on the outer face and segmental on the inner. A cornice beam of green concrete runs around the building, incised with sloping grooves. The chimneys and flues are topped with lacquered black cubes.

The roofs over the three ranges—east, west and central—are curved in section and now covered in copper, largely hidden behind the cornice beam which acts as a low parapet. The original roofing material was concrete; Outram designed the current copper replacement.

Site and Plan

The house stands on an elevated terrace approached from an entrance driveway to the north, with land falling away to the south and east, providing far-reaching views across the High Weald landscape.

The plan is based on a 900-millimetre module grid, corresponding to the width of the piers. This grid is expressed throughout the exterior, interior and the terraces and hard landscaping around the house—Outram describes this as like a vestigial hypostyle or, in his developing iconography, the infinite forest.

The house is single-storey with an irregular H-shaped footprint. The two side wings run north to south (east and west), while the crossbar between them contains the entrance hall to the north and the drawing room to the south. This creates two courtyards: an entrance forecourt to the north and a garden terrace to the south, in which Outram created the Millennium Pavilion in 1999.

The layout comprises four intersecting enfilades: two running north-south, separated by two running east-west. The east wing, extended northwards by two rooms in identical materials in 1988, contains bedrooms and bathrooms, a library and study. The west wing contains a dining room to the south and the kitchen, utility and laundry rooms. At the centre, the entrance hall leads east and west through small side halls to the wings, and south to the large drawing room, which sits at the centre of the east-west enfilade of reception rooms, with the library to the east and dining room to the west. Both the dining room and a servery (added by Outram in 1988) link through to the orangery to the west.

Exterior

The building's aesthetic derives from its distinctive cladding materials, applied with Classical proportions to a three-dimensional realisation of the tartan grid on which it is planned. The elevations present a flat composition of vertical and horizontal bands of colour and texture. Curves appear only in the gable ends, where the green cornice beam expresses the profile of the roofs, and in the spherical projections of the pier capitals and chimneys. This coloured banding is a motif familiar in Outram's later buildings: a geological stratigraphy capped with the green of a forest canopy.

The entrance front is a powerful, almost fully blind composition. Double doors painted indigo—"the colour of shadow" as Outram describes it—are reached via a shallow pyramidal ramp and set within the central range. Two square chimneys with distinctive black cubic caps rise behind, and the whole is flanked by projecting side wings enclosing the paved forecourt. The strong linear geometry is contrasted by three thick segmental curves of the cornice beam expressing the roof over each wing. All elevations display the same refinement of colour, surface and form, but the east and south elevations are more heavily glazed to take advantage of the views.

Interior

The interior is highly bespoke, with Outram's involvement evident in almost every detail, from the laundry room to the drawing room. It is more conventionally domestic in character than the exterior, with greater use of natural materials, particularly wood. The underlying grid continues throughout, expressed more subtly in the flooring pattern and incised grooves in ceilings and walls marking the positions of notional walls and columns.

The entrance hall has a tomb-like quality, top-lit by two circular rooflights generating columns of light—or "columna lucis" as Outram terms them—casting down onto bases inscribed on the floor. These are polished travertine inlaid with two dials of a giant compass marking 365 days, 52 weeks, 13 lunar months, 12 Roman months and 24 hours. The hall has apsed ends with walls of polished stucco with bands of burr elm edged in aluminium. A door of avodiré wood with marquetry inlay forms a deliberate pinch point leading into the drawing room, transitioning from a dimly-lit space into one of great light.

The curved roof over the centre of the drawing room becomes a vaulted ceiling within, lined with veneered plywood scored into panels divided by the grid lines. The walls mainly use pigmented plaster that was heated and waxed to give a lustrous finish, a technique called stucco lustro. The library and dining room have similarly vaulted ceilings, the latter with green plaster to the walls. The connecting pairs of double doors are inlaid with marquetry giving a trompe-l'oeil lattice effect, echoing the actual latticework fanlights above. The dining room has columns of stucco lustro and wood veneer, and built-in cupboards with marquetry doors.

A hierarchy of spaces within the house reflects the different functions of the various rooms, but consistency of detail runs throughout. Circular, cylindrical and segmental forms recur in mouldings and fittings, as does the gridded motif. Ceilings are panelled timber and where flat rather than vaulted—such as in the bedrooms and bathrooms—mirrors are inlaid between curved-profile timber battens or used at cornice level, creating the sense of an extended space beyond the confines of the room.

Hard Landscaping

The hard landscaping around the house is a continuation of its architecture out into the landscape. The courtyards to the north and south and the terrace to the east are paved in contrasting dark and light paviors, the lighter used to express the grid on which the house is built. To the front of the house, setts brought by Rausing from Berlin are arranged in a large circle. To the south, the grid of the courtyard dissolves out into the grassed terrace as if partially submerged below the ground, before the land falls away.

A long, stepped terrace runs down the east side of the building, connecting the platform on which it stands with the lawn beyond. Square columns of timber trellis-work with aluminium wire globe capitals stand to the east and west. These were intended to have climbers grow in and through them to create green columns, but the planting has had limited success. By the front and side doors stand free-standing cast concrete boot cleaners, like truncated columns with a lobed section and domed top, with a slotted opening lined with brushes.

Orangery

The arcaded stone walls of the Victorian orangery form the basis of its polychromatic reimagining by Outram. Internally, a pierced frieze of brick and clay tile supports a heavy green cornice with blue concrete dentils. Around the edge, engaged red brick and black concrete columns of three feet diameter conceal services and structural steels. There are raised planters faced in black engineering brick and the floor is laid in a striking geometric pattern of black and white marble. The orangery was given a plastic roof in 1988, replaced around 2001 by one of polycarbonate and in 2007 by a permanent roof of steel and glass.

The orangery connects to the dining room through a glass-roofed antechamber on its east side. There is a similar arrangement on the west side but with an ornamental pool and fountain, and behind is a brick and tile lean-to with cloakrooms. The west antechamber leads outside to a raised gothic loggia lined with lustre-glazed geometric mosaic tiles in shades of pink and white.

Millennium Pavilion

On the south terrace, against the east wing of the house, stands the small Millennium Pavilion of 1999. Intended as a veranda for sitting out, the pavilion takes the form of a louvred roof supported at the back by the side of the house and at the front by two concrete columns.

The pavilion is rich with the primordial iconography which weaves through much of Outram's work. The pre-cast columns are multi-coloured and have five stages; they are the ultimate realisation of the Robot order. Each column has four white legs, surmounted with a square blue base, its faces set with black marble pebbles and corners cut with an ogee to give a wave-like form and bring the section to an octagon. From here an octagonal drum formed of green concrete with coloured brick inclusions, including brick made of cobalt, rises and is cut away to form vertical green leaves, and thence a cluster of cylinders with a blue and white spiral pattern. Then there is a drum of lead crystal and above, a shiny black capital.

The columns support cylindrical stainless steel beams, the ends of which are incised like the gills of a shark and incorporate lights. Above are copper mouldings, the fascia of a blind, and on top of that a roof of stainless steel or aluminium louvres that open to let in sunlight or close to keep water out. When the pavilion is illuminated, light is cast down through the centre of the columns, radiating out through the lead crystal drums and creating a pool of light at the bases between the four legs.

Outram explains the stages of the columns, from the bottom upwards, as representing the gestation of our species and of the individual: the emergence from sea to land, or for the individual, the trauma of birth and experience of gravity; next comes air, atmosphere or speech; then light or the granting of sight; and finally the development of higher thought.