An Open Plan Oak Frame Home

Peter and Miranda Nicholson sometimes describe their house in a village near Axbridge, Somerset as an upturned boat. Walk upstairs in the barn shaped, stone clad house and you are in for a surprise: you are in a 16m long five bay oak framed building. Above you is an eye catching - positively riveting - soaring queen post oak roof, supported on each side by massive aisle posts. With its plain pine boarded floor, cunningly distressed with a wash of white emulsion paint, it is a room which has real wow factor - a kitchen, dining room and living room all in one.

Now rethink the concept of the boat, forget the soaring oak ceiling above and imagine you are on the upper deck, looking out of the windows to sea. Beneath you are the cabins. The three bedrooms, on the west side of the hall, and the bathroom are stowed away in what Peter calls the concrete bunker i.e. the ground floor, which has an inner skin of 225mm insulated blockwork and acts as the plinth on which the oak frame stands.

In the past Peter, together with Rupert Newman, who runs Westwind Oak Buildings a few miles away in a village south of Bristol, have collaborated on a handful of new oak framed buildings under the name of Framework.

Now however, Peter works with Miranda, a trained linguist, running a translating business based in the gallery, perched high in the roof of the entrance hall. It is a temporary home because the space it overlooks - they call it middle barn - was little more than a tall lean-to with a tin roof where the pigs were killed on the former smallholding, which the Nicholsons bought in 1997. Middle barn also forms the incomplete link to the third phase of the house. Because of a traumatic experience with their first site choice in a nearby village that set them back £10,000, they have had to wait for the funds to materialise but hope to start later this year.

"We would have liked to have glazed all the rear of the house. It would have brought in light and given us a lovely view up the slope leading to the Mendip hills at the rear," says Peter. "However, as we were fairly sure the planners would say no, we decided we didn't have the stomach for another battle after the traumas in our previous village."

The house is, however, far more than just one long range built on the footprint of the collapsing barn that had previously stood on the site. The middle barn adds a great deal of interest. So does the planned third phase. This will be very different in style from the main section of the house, which is basically an oak frame with a breathing wall construction, faced outside with stone reclaimed from the demolished barn. The final phase will be to tie together and convert the large solid walled stone barn that remains, into a garage and workshop with en suite master bedroom and dressing room above.

This will be a big job. Some of the walls of the old stone building are falling away and the plan is to construct what amounts to a ring beam using hollow brick pillars. These will be filled with concrete that will form a separate structure on the inside. Peter hopes to use Rupert Newman again as he believes the interior will be tall enough to take two galleries in the roof, high above bedroom and bathroom level. The idea is that one should be a space for the children and the other a new, permanent home to the Nicholson's business.

"Tying the old barn into the existing structure will enable us to do some of the imaginative things, like the galleries, we felt unable to do in the first phase," says Peter.

"We are particulalry pleased with the way the entrance hall works. Our architect, John Thompson, cleverly managed to give us a space that was spanned by a lovely arch braced roof this is wonderful to look at from close-up in the office gallery. Downstairs he has created space for the childrens computer, plus bookshelves, cupboards and a glass screen that gains light from the garden into what would otherwise be a rather dark hall area.

"There are a few things we would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight, but not many. This is because we had experience of renovating previous houses and also because we were forced into the house before it was complete when one of our temporary homes was sold rapidly. We had to move in when there was still scaffolding in the middle barn. I think this was a good thing. If you move into a house while the workmen are still around adding the finishing touches on site, they are far more likely to ask you how to go about something such as the positioning of power points and radiators and the sides on which doors are hung. We even swapped the kitchen from the west to the east end of the main living area at the eleventh hour."

The Nicholsons were able to complete the entire project on a modest budget - £160,000 for 220m² for a very high quality build. A major reason for this was that they have lived in the area for 12 years and having worked on previous houses they had good local contacts.

"We have achieved what we wanted and when the new wing is finished it will be a 262m² house with four bedrooms," says Peter. "After all our traumas we are delighted with the way it has turned out and pleased we decided to press ahead and build. We all love the house, though I never stop looking at other opportunities."

Further reading:

• An Oak Framed Self build in Oxfordshire
• An Oak Frame Home on a Sloping Site
• The Evolution of Timber Frame