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Saltmarsh House

Location
Norfolk
Year
2024
Typology
Residential
Area
180 m²
Interior design
Wigglesworth
Photography
—
Contractor
—
01

Specified for absence

The house is occupied perhaps ten weeks a year, half a mile from salt water. That rules out most of what a coastal house is usually given: no untreated steel, no veneer, nothing with a lacquer that will lift. What is left is oiled oak, lime plaster and solid brass, all of which look worse for a season and then stop changing. The alternative is a house that looks perfect on handover and tired by the third summer.

Brass, unlacquered. It will go brown within a year and stay there, which is the point — a finish that cannot degrade further is a finish nobody has to maintain.

Through the house

Every material here is chosen for how it looks in year five, not on handover.

Project note
Shutters closed, which is how the house spends most of the year
And open, for ten weeks
One run, solid timber, no applied finish. Everything here can be sanded back by someone who is not a joiner, which matters in a house half a mile from salt water.

The long room, facing the water it is detailed against.

Two bedrooms, deliberately the same
No fitted storage anywhere in the house

The threshold, where most of the maintenance actually happens.

Nothing here will look better than it does now. That was the specification, not an apology for it.

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