Redshank beach house review – in deepest Essex, cork tiles are back

Dotted about the coastal waters of Britain, in the approaches to major ports, are some of the most astounding and least visited works of 20th-century architecture. These are the Maunsell sea forts, platforms for anti-aircraft guns built in the second world war, posses of four-legged pods that stand in the sea like HG Wells aliens gone for a paddle. They have been influential, especially on the 1960s visionaries Archigram, who in turn inspired the hi-tech architecture of Richard Rogers and others.

The sea forts lie behind Archigram’s most potent single idea, for “Walking Cities”, which fantasised about buildings wandering the Earth. Which never happened, but now another Maunsell-flavoured future has arrived, if rather small, in the form of a seaside retreat on stilts for an artist couple, designed by the architect Lisa Shell. One aspect undreamt by futurists of the past is that an artefact of the 21st century should come covered (as it is) in such a venerable material as cork.

The location is the edge of Essex, in a zone where the conventions of the land break down. It is a place of natural beauty, flat, horizontally grand, saline, a site of special scientific interest, with flora particular to the environment and more shades of grey-green light playing across land and water than could be thought possible. An ancient priory is not far off. There are also wind farms, a sewage farm, concrete wartime defences, caravan parks, rickety, shack-like houses that look as if they could blow away in the next storm, old gravel pits, strings of telegraph poles. A Brexiter’s union flag sometimes punctuates. The settlement where the cork-clad house stands was a prewar holiday resort, curtailed by the conflict, now a line of fragile houses along one side of a rough road; the new house stands alone on the other side, perched above a long band of shrubby sea blite.

It is, indeed, uncertain that this really is land. It is squelchy at the best of times and several times a year is completely covered by high tide. In a recent bad flood the waters on the site were more than one metre deep. So the new house raises itself 2.4 metres off the ground on three steel supports, elliptical in section and painted red like the legs of a wading bird, for which reason it is called Redshank. It shows the influence of the sea forts, a group of which can be seen from here on a clear day.

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Above the steel, the structure is cross-laminated timber (CLT), the engineered product that increasingly crops up in articles on interesting new buildings, which enables wood to have some of the structural properties of reinforced concrete, while being lighter and more ecological. It allows the thing that holds the building up also to be the finish, the thing you look at and touch. It is made in factories with machines digitally instructed to meet the dimensions and specifications of a given project and then arrives in large elements on a building site, in this case from Austria.

On the inner walls and ceilings the CLT is left visible, giving a sturdy, boat-like feel. The floors are painted white, says sculptor Marcus Taylor, who is one half of the couple of artistic clients, to stop the place looking too much like a chalet. A kitchen in reclaimed teak and an oak front door vary the notes. Well-placed windows, variously sized and proportioned, catch the views and light. They resist the urge to display all the landscape all the time and there are shadowy as well as bright places. The aim, says Shell, was to find moments of “real privacy and distance” amid the expansiveness – to sit at the dining table for example and to feel as if you are alone with the horizon.

Then there is the cork, in a version processed through heat and pressure to make it more durable, which covers top, underside and all four walls of the exterior. Its attraction, conceptually speaking, is that like the CLT it does more than one thing: it insulates, it weatherproofs and it is the (appealing) finish. Rain washes down its sides, doing away with the need for gutters. It suggests the satisfyingly simple formula that CLT + cork = enclosure, although in fact there is a precautionary layer of other materials inserted in the cork to make sure it really does keep out the wet.

The cork makes it both otherworldly and natural, like the local vegetation. It is at once spongiform and sharp-edged and in the rain it stains like concrete, but more charmingly. It tempts metaphors to be mixed: the building is a dirty cloud, but also a cork from a wine bottle perched on toothpicks. It permits the fantasy that, if the floods got really bad, it could float away. For Shell, it was “important that the house is covered with a natural material that could be pecked at by birds and will weather”; the urge to give it a sealing or preserving finish was resisted. She likes the way that the heat of its processing has left black fragments of charcoal embedded in it.

At the same time she didn’t want the material to be “a bit false, a bit fashionable” and it was important that it actually did a job of making the house work well. Nor did she want the whole structure to be “a vanity project, an immediately extraordinary object trying to be visible”, but something more like the bird hides and other matter-of-fact structures to be found round here.

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Other elements complete the project. There is a timber balcony with built-in seats and a kind of niche for shelter and privacy. Extravagantly for what is a one-bedroom capsule, there are two flights of stairs in galvanised steel, one connecting to the road and the other descending to a zone of wetness behind, in order to allow “different ways of arriving and leaving”. There are bird boxes and a bat house built into the structure, to create another degree of connection with nature.

Redshank is in fact not the work of Shell alone but a collaboration with Taylor. He is something of a construction addict, having at different times commissioned other houses and studios. The idea of the three-legged structure and the cork cladding are his; Shell’s role has partly been to interpret, elaborate and realise, to make the ideas into a plausible building.

Redshank owes its final form to both of them. It is an arresting fusion of nature and technology, of shelter and exposure. Archigram may not have thought that the future would be cork-wrapped, but it is the more subtle and interesting for that.