Chestnut Cottage Hobbit House
Hobbit House, Cambridge
The Brief
Our brief was to build a hobbit house that can be visited by customers at the Ida Darwin Farm Shop.
The Design
Designing the Hobbit House that became Chestnut Cottage was a lot of fun. Everyone mucked in and we tried out new skills creating a little gem of a building that makes us and everyone who visits smile and smile and then smile some more.
We experimented with a lot of different building techniques with this structure including cob for the walls.
The Result
Chestnut Cottage was built using sweet chestnut in the round for the structure with oak cladding on two faces and cob walls with a lime render on the other two sides. We decided to add cord wood and multi coloured bottles in these walls, giving a great variety of textures and colours.
The windows are glazed with toughened glass, and give views of the pigs, chickens and goats at Ida Darwin Farm Shop, Cambridge. This structure is open to everybody who shops there.
The cottage has a living turf roof, with the turf sitting on soil, a flexible membrane liner and then underlay on the tanalised planks. The upstand around the perimeter of the roof holding all of this in, is made of oak.
