This is an interesting job that’s finally got to site…

Pushed into getting the house up to wall plate level thanks to a planning expiry (5 years up in May), a one-off detached house outside of Westport, County Mayo. Quite a long planning saga:

– Outline planning granted (I didn’t do this one)
– Permission Consequent on Outline – refused
– Permission Consequent on Outline resubmitted & FI’d
– Permission Consequent granted
– Extension of planning time limit refused, I’m going to do a fuller blog post on this one.

One of the conditions that the Outline had was for the design to be single storey; there are a few ways to achieve this without it being just a big bungalow but the one we opted for was a traditional double pitch layout.

Found in numerous traditional buildings; the double pitch frequently arose when a building grew too small for it’s purpose and was extended alongside with the resultant double pitch format. Below is a school building on the way out to Sligo with exactly this type of layout:

Adopting this format allows you to have a larger floor area but the design is still single storey and the mass of the building is broken down nicely. I also redesigned our neighbour’s (Mary) house in a similar style but at a storey and 1/2 with roof lights to front and rear.

The use of the double pitch is therefore not unique; there is an excellent contemporary example nearby done by Paul Keogh Architects:

Note:This photo was taken a while back and a lot of landscaping has been done since~lovely contemporary example.

So,back to our project: the ground has been broken, we’ve done a provisional set out to check location and I’m doing a detailed check of formwork setting out (for the foundations) this week.

I’ll keep you updated with ‘in-progress’ photos on each visit. Below is the cut we’ve made to get the house down to level required by planning.

And below is sketch (Vectorworks tentative sketch mode) showing something of what is planned:

Also, I have a two storey staggered block going in for a planning application shortly,not exactly double pitched but quite similar.

More to follow…