Wildwood

Wildwood is a private house set behind an integral screen wall, designed in 1971 and built between 1973 and 1975 by Richard Horden for his parents Peter and Irene Horden. The structure employs an exposed steel frame with columns arranged on a 7.6 metre by 10.3 metre grid. Main beams span 10.3 metres, with secondary beams at 3.4 metre centres spanning between the main beams, and timber joists spanning between the secondary beams. Service cores provide lateral stability. The building has a flat roof, window walls of full-height double-glazed fixed and sliding doors framed in bronze-anodised aluminium (the original glazing), and end walls infilled in concrete block.

The plan comprises a rectangular house of sixteen bays set within a courtyard designed to the same grid. The house has a central living area flanked by central pods containing respectively the kitchen and utility rooms, and two bathrooms. At one end are two bedrooms, at the other two study areas. Continuous corridors run down each side of the house, creating a free plan in which the bathroom and kitchen serve respectively as wholly or partially enclosed pods.

The glazing is set back behind the columns and cornice so the house is shielded from the sun. The garden frontage has a near-regular symmetry of fixed and sliding windows from a central axis, with the bathroom and kitchen/utility areas treated slightly differently. The entrance front is similar, except that Mrs Horden insisted on a properly-opening front door.

Internal walls are of plastered block, ceilings of plastered plasterboard. The kitchen has studded rubber flooring. The living room features built-in white cupboards at low level along the cross wall. The kitchen has built-in white wall cupboards and cupboards set under working surfaces. Sliding doors across the corridors are concealed within the screen wall, held by a notch. Internal glazed doors are positioned at either end of the kitchen.

The screen wall is an integral part of the composition, forming an entrance courtyard to the house with a solid gate. The garage and ancillary store are not included in the listing. The courtyard is set out to the same grid, with a small pond and square paved surrounds.

Peter Horden was a successful lawyer who, with his opera-singer wife and their two children, moved in the 1950s to an Edwardian house in Branksome Park, Poole. When the children left home they subdivided the site into three, selling the Edwardian house and moving first to a conventional bungalow largely designed by Peter Horden. For the other site, however, Peter and Irene Horden allowed their son, newly qualified from the Architectural Association, to design them a new house. In 1968, while still a student, Richard Horden had made a tour of the United States by Greyhound bus, armed with a 90-day pass and Sherban Cantacuzino's book on Modern Houses. He admired houses by Eero Saarinen and Elliot Noyes, and particularly the work of Craig Ellwood and the mature Case Study Houses in California. The Case Study House programme began in 1945 around Los Angeles as a campaign for architect-designed, relatively low-cost homes that were light in their materials and open in their free planning and relationship between indoor and outdoor space. Ellwood's very symmetrical plans set across the whole width of the plot, seen by Horden at the Daphne House of 1960 and Rosen House of 1961, were most influential on the Courtyard House. These light, steel California houses were precisely those admired a decade earlier by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers when they made a similar student pilgrimage to the West Coast. In return these influences were re-exported around the world with the success of the British high tech movement. Horden, however, prefers the term light tech as more descriptive of his preoccupation with nature and landscape in addition to experimentation at the margins between architecture and engineering. The courtyard is an integral part of the design, the screen wall a further dimension in the building, and the transparency through the house is critical to the design. The strong horizontality, flow of space and transparency were what he admired in the American houses listed above.

Peter and Irene Horden were baffled by the drawings, in which house and courtyard were expressed as a single grid, but quickly came to love the house. It has proved very suitable for an elderly couple, being extremely easy to maintain, having no steps and having the garden virtually as an extra room within the house. In recent literature, Horden has referred to his parents' house as the Courtyard House. Although designed when he was in his twenties, the ideas behind it have informed his subsequent work, both in the detailing of his steel frames and the concepts that inform his buildings. Architecture for him is still about transparency, so that nature goes through the building. There are many comparisons to be made between his parents' house and Evening Hill House, the house built by Horden for himself in 2002, and which was voted Building of the Year for 2002. The same transparency also informs Horden's other recent work, the Queen's Stand at Epsom of 1989 to 1992, the Study Gallery at Poole of 1995, and Ercol Factory at Princes Risborough of 1999, where he expanded the concept of the parents' house to a factory and office building.

The house for his parents secured Horden a job with Norman Foster from 1975 to 1984, where he worked on the interiors at Willis Faber, and on the Sainsbury Centre, Stanstead Airport and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank headquarters, as well as on a number of unbuilt projects. Horden learned a great deal from the experience of working with Foster, who introduced him to aeronautics. Many of Horden's buildings borrow from the aeronautic and yacht-building industries. In 1985 he was a finalist in the competition for a new Grand Buildings, and set up in private practice.

In 1982 the critic Martin Pawley described the Courtyard House as a superb Miesian house. Horden later wrote that Mies invented contemporary space, a new kind of thinking about the negative space around and within buildings. This is what the house for his parents also achieves, a carefully thought-through concept from the entrance gate right through the building, which survives essentially intact. Steel houses are relatively rare in Britain, the cost of steel ensuring that they began to be built here only in the mid-1960s. This is an exceptionally fine example that has a generosity of scale and exceptional completeness that set it apart from other architect's homes. Robin Spence, another designer of steel-framed houses, described Horden's house as having qualities of light and space that are a revelation and provide an environment that is nothing like that of an ordinary house. This quality of environment seems to provide an altogether more liberating and satisfactory experience than the compartmented house. The first work of an internationally celebrated architect, the house was extensively reviewed abroad and won an RIBA Commendation in 1975.