Master of Disguise

A subtle mimicking of the surrounding hills has allowed this Angus home to become part of the landscape.

- Caroline Ednie

Taking its cue – and hue – directly from the Angus landscape, Zinc House fits perfectly into its surroundings. In fact, it has an almost chameleon-like presence on the brow of the hill on which it sits, overlooking the rolling hills towards St Andrews and the sea beyond. On a cloudy day it appears as a battleship grey, yet against blue skies it seems almost green in colour. And on a rainy day the house and its surrounding sandstone courtyard walls gradually turn the same colour.

None of this happened by chance, as architect Graeme Hutton explains: “The stone in the area has this lovely mossy-green tone. We liked it so much we originally thought of using it to clad the house, topped with a zinc roof. But the more we experimented with the local sandstone the more we realised that it had limitations as a building material. The site is very exposed and the sandstone would have quickly eroded in the wind and frost.

“But one day when I was thinking about the project, I had an idea. I texted the clients, saying, ‘Let’s do the whole thing in zinc, with just the boundary walls and courtyard in sandstone.’ They gave the go-ahead right away,” he says.

“The greeny-grey chlorite in the local stone is what informed the decision to clad the building in a single skin of zinc. When we first put the zinc sample next to the wet stone on site, the colour matched. It was a eureka moment!”

The appropriately named Zinc House also looks to the Angus land scape in terms of its form, echoing the agricultural sheds that had previously stood on the site, which owners Richard and Jackie Callison purchased in 2005 along with the neigh bouring farmhouse and land. The couple, who had lived in a converted cottage adjacent to the farm for almost 30 years, knew those sheds had views to die for.