Project Gallery
The brief: Design a house for a single male watchmaker, sited within a fictional new development for a town of artisans in North East England, on ground of genuine historical significance.
The house grew from routine, not form. I spent several weeks mapping the watchmaker's daily, weekly and yearly life: where he would be at each hour, what specialist spaces his craft demanded, how a lifestyle becomes a plan. The massing study that followed used sheets of tracing paper, colour-coded by function (red for high circulation, blue for specialised space, orange for rest, grey for transition), with version stacked on version until the overlaps revealed themselves. Wherever a circulation point kept recurring, regardless of the design around it, that was treated as fixed; everything else was built outward from it, a decision reached by modal average rather than by instinct. Stacked together, the tracing paper sheets read like a Mondrian.
From those nodal points, the watchmaker's life took shape in section. His bedroom faces south-west, catching the evening light across a balcony. His workshop faces north: no direct sun to glare off the equipment, but daylight enough to work by. A bootroom entrance lets him take his morning walk and breakfast without carrying mud through the hallway. At the centre, a spiral staircase does two jobs at once: functionally, it draws hot air up and out, pulling cool air through behind it; symbolically, it stands as the axis of a clock face, his daily routine turning him through the house the way hands turn round a dial.
Artisan was my first encounter with standard architectural drawing (plan, section, isometric) and, more importantly, my first lesson in where trust belongs. AutoCAD and SketchUp were useful; my design instinct ideas mattered more. The drawings I'm still proudest of from this project aren't the technical ones. They're the collages and sketches, the ones that sold the feel of the building in a way no render managed.
