Why building your own home is so much more than bricks and mortar

The points can be summarised as: Pilotis i.e. columns used to lift up buildings and create open spaces; free-form interior designs, enabled by structural columns; free-form facade designs, liberated from load-bearing functions; horizontal windows to provide even daylight across rooms and rooftop gardens on flat roofs to protect concrete and create space.

Corbusier also referred to the beauty, poetry and spirituality of the home and he noted that “To build one’s own house is very much like making one’s will…when the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but the moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life”.

By stating a home is a machine for living in, Corbusier talks of it making “daily life rapid and simple, yet providing comfort” and he also notes that a home provides surroundings where meditation can take place, adding that it is “a place in which beauty brings the repose of spirit which is so indispensable”.

It is precisely why architecture can indeed be poetic. It can tell a story. It can excite and be an opportunity for expression.

The writer and philosopher Gaston Bachelard says “Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the

space of a house.

This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”.

To pursue such dreams, architects often use the design of their own homes as places of experimentation. Free from the constraints of a client brief, they are liberated to pursue ideals and I must say, not always successfully.

In my own home, I’ve experimented with industrial aluminium grillage as access decking set within the confines of a Grade II Listed building. The contrast between modernity and history being juxtaposed.

There are some wonderful examples of architect’s own homes, such as the Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames in California, Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut and homes by Frank Lloyd Wright.

I would recommend that readers take time to explore some of the great architectural houses of the last century and draw ideas which can inform the creation of their own homes.

Blenkharn Leonard Architects, www.brable.com.