The house is located in the Rothschild estate, which has been turned into a public museum since the middle of the last century. However, the previous owners take care of Wadsdon, and there is the headquarters of their foundation and the archive, the new building for which Archi.ru published. Flint House, commissioned by Lord Rothschild, was originally conceived as a home for an archive keeper, but eventually became a gesamtkunstwerk inspired by its natural and cultural context.
Flint House is a telling name: flint is flint, and it was this material that became the key material for the house. In the past, in England, this stone was used for construction, but in modern times this tradition has disappeared. The architects' return to the flint masonry was the location of the site over a unique deposit of flint, a residential area enclosed in a chalk strip running from the white cliffs of Dover to the east coast of Britain.
The site chosen for construction existed as a natural "island" in the middle of the Wadsdon estate, and the architects decided to emphasize its pristine state with their construction. Flint House and its studio wing emerge from the ground like geological formations and gradually - thanks to a thoughtful color scheme - merge with the sky. Their shape in the form of stepped platforms reflects their role as viewing platforms, "collecting lenses" for the surrounding landscape.
Their facades are faced with flint, which gradually brightens with increasing height; at the very top, flint is replaced by chalk-limestone. The stepped roof is covered with terrazzo, where a similar transition from dark gray to white is made even more smooth.
The environment penetrates the Flint House interior through three "cuts". The road cuts the house at its lowest point; the walls bounding it are mirrored from the outside and transparent when viewed from the inside. The garden "enters" the center of the house in the form of slabs of dark green serpentinite, outside merging with moss and ferns and turning into a bench. The third natural element, the river, delimits the study, the private space, and the living room: this is a grotto where the walls are covered with grains of flint enclosed in chalk - this is how they are found in the deposit passing under the house, and the ceiling of black glass reflects water. At the same time, a continuous strip of concrete ceiling gives unity to the interior.
Flint House is a gesamtkunstwerk, the result of a synthesis of the arts. Even during the development and implementation of the project, artists were invited to participate, who created works inspired by the materiality of the building, its creators, the context - in particular, works from the Rothschild collection stored in Wadsdon.
