Winter sun, first snow...

It was a chilly, raw weekend, and we certainly felt it in the caravan! I just couldn't get my feet warm the whole weekend, so on Sunday afternoon took a stroll around the fields to capture progress 'from a distance' on ECF2 after so much time focussing on the nitty gritty detail.

What I saw took me back to our architectural brief for a building which had a 'sense of place' in this special landscape, a home which looked as if it belongs to its surroundings. With that in mind and seeing the entire 'mass' of the building through the scaffolding, I felt we were well on our way to realising that brief.
When starting out on this project we were keen to build a contemporary house which was simple in form, yet followed the lines of a traditional highland 'long-house' design.
An architectural practice which has pioneered this design code is Dualchas based in Skye (http://www.dualchas.co.uk/), not least as a reaction to kit house designs that have been more 'urban-American' than 'traditional Scottish' which have popped up in the Scottish landscape in recent years. We were quite taken by Dualchas's work at the time, whilst at the same time needed a local practice we could 'get involved with' in our house design and which knew what worked for the National Park where we live.