Building quietly in a noisy coastal market.

Field notes on materials, light, and the discipline of not over-designing for the photographer. A short essay drawing on prior small-scale residential work.

The coastal market we are writing from is, on any given month, the most photographed twenty kilometres in Southern Europe. It is also a market that produces, by our count, more architecturally regrettable houses per square kilometre than any comparable stretch of coast on the continent. The two facts, we suspect, are not unrelated.

The trap

The trap is that the coastal vernacular is unforgiving. A hard-edged volume on a soft horizon reads as an imposition. A glazed elevation that is not detailed for the light reads as a hotel lobby. The local stone carries the building if it is allowed to, and falls apart visually if it is asked to perform as a finish rather than a structure.

What the discipline looks like

A short list, drawn from our own prior work and what we read on the better houses we walk past:

• Specify the masonry to the wall plane, not to the corner
• Calibrate the openings to the light at three hours of the day, not one
• Resist the temptation to over-design the threshold between inside and outside
• Use the existing trees as the brief, not as the obstacle

The photograph

The photograph is the seductive end-state, and the photograph is rarely the brief that the user inherits. The discipline is to design the building the user lives in, and to allow the photograph to be a side effect of that work — or, just as honourably, to be no photograph at all.