Covert House and Murphy House join 2016 RIBA House of the Year shortlist

RIBA is taking a little more time in revealing the shortlist for the 2016 House of the Year award. Most recently, RIBA announced that DSDHA's Covert House and the Murphy House by Richard Murphy Architects have made it onto the shortlist, along with the Outhouse and Ansty Plum revealed last week.

After all seven shortlisted houses are unveiled on BBC Channel 4's “Grand Designs” TV series, the House of the Year will be revealed on screen on December 15.

Check out the latest shortlisted houses below.

Covert House, Clapham, South London by DSDHA

Project excerpt: 

“As very busy architects Deborah Saunt and David Hills of DSDHA have had to wait a long time to design their own home – but the wait has been worthwhile. They have used it as a test-bed for their ideas on sustainability. Their experiments – carried out under restrictive Conservation Area planning conditions – resulted in an unorthodox, semi-underground house that challenges what it means to design a contemporary domestic space. 

The two-storey house is a simple composition of two interlocked white cubes, which is entirely shielded from street view. The planners limited to a single-storey height so DSDHA had to half bury the house. The exterior presents itself as a low-rise, lightweight architectural piece of architecture, clad in white render, with chamfered mirror reveals. The house also has to follow strict rules to reduce overlooking from neighbouring gardens: it has a stepped roof line in section so it is lower close to garden boundaries, from which it is set back clear from on all sides. 

Covert House is indeed a case study on the potential for unlocking backland sites and creating architectural opportunities that subtly densify our residential areas and respond to the urban necessity of building more houses close to the city centre [...]”

More project info.

Murphy House, Edinburgh by Richard Murphy Architects

Project excerpt:

“This project is a rare example of construction of a contemporary house within the World Heritage Site of the New Town of Edinburgh. It is a house designed by Richard Murphy for his own use and is consequently something of an architectural and environmental experiment. There are a number of agendas at work.

Firstly, with a modest floor area of 165 m2 on a footprint of only 11 metre x 6 metre, (formerly half of a garden to an apartment on Forth Street), it nevertheless contains three bedrooms, a living/dining/kitchen area at varying levels, study, basement storage, garage, utility room and roof terrace. 

Secondly, it is an essay in how contemporary design might contribute to a historic and particular place in the New Town, in this instance an unresolved junction of two streets. The adjacent gable end should not have been exposed and the house deliberately responded by becoming a ‘bookend’ to it [...]

A final agenda is the many architectural influences at work. Not least is the work of Carlo Scarpa, on whom Richard Murphy is an authority.”

More project info.

All photos courtesy of RIBA.