Secular Retreat (Chivelstone House)

The site was known as Middledown. A local landowner had built a house there for his family in the early 1940s; much diminished, it was still standing when Living Architecture bought the site in 2008. It has been taken down, but some of its Monterey pines and a small hexagonal enclosure of concrete blocks remain.

Living Architecture, the organisation the writer Alain de Botton established so that the public can stay in houses by leading architects, invited Peter Zumthor to design the house, which is credited to Atelier Peter Zumthor with Mole Architects, the site architects. De Botton had had the idea of a "secular retreat" in mind for some time. Zumthor first saw the site in 2008. His first scheme, a group of pavilions spread across the lower part of the land, was more than Living Architecture could afford, and he drew a simplified design.

Construction took five years, on a site that was often very exposed, with a local main contractor and a number of subcontractors. The house was one of the first Living Architecture projects to start and the last to finish, more than ten years after the beginning. In 2019 the RIBA gave it a South West Award and a National Award, and put it on the shortlist for its House of the Year.

The house stands on a hill in South Devon, a mile from the coast, on a plot of about five acres. A ring of Monterey pines surrounds it, and Zumthor insisted on keeping them. He took his starting point from the rocky outcrops (tors) of Devon and from the verticality of those pines.

The fully glazed living space sits between hand-rammed concrete columns that carry a massive cantilevered roof, whose overhangs reach five metres in places; visitors enter beneath that overhang. Two bedroom wings extend from it, and every room is on one level. The roof reads as a single slab, but it is made of two layers of concrete with load-bearing insulation between them, the upper layer reaching past the line of the glazing.

Walls and columns are rammed concrete: a damp mix of concrete, earth and stones is packed into formwork by hand, one layer at a time, each laid once the one below has set, usually the next day. The walls are unreinforced. The irregularities show, and Zumthor likens them to "a diary in the walls". The roof is poured concrete.

The floor is Blue Lias stone from a Somerset quarry, in varied shapes, its joints answering the pour lines of the concrete above. The interior timbers are American cherry, pear, maple and apple; the bedrooms have pearwood floors, and doors, shelves, wardrobes and kitchen units are apple and cherry. Most of the furniture and lighting was made for the house, with the architect. The garden was designed with the Rathbone Partnership; terraces and paths are rough-hewn Somerset Blue Lias set on edge.

Five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, make this a holiday house for ten guests at most. The big living space is where they cook, sit down at the dining table and settle by the fireplace. Zumthor pictured more than a holiday home: somewhere a group of people could do something together.

The house can only be entered by staying there, booked through Living Architecture, which asks guests to let no one in apart from those sleeping in the house, unless arranged beforehand. It stands alone on its hill; the nearest railway station is Totnes, forty minutes away by car.