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On a magical, watery site on Lord Jacob Rothschild’s Waddesdon estate in England, the award-winning Flint House rises in fading shades of quartz.
If buildings, like people, have their seasons, then Flint House is defiantly a winter house. The monolithic, wedge-shaped building is veiled in a quartz skin that graduates from glassy darkness at the base through lightening bands of grays to the chalky whites of the stepped roofline. Built in the hinterlands of Buckinghamshire’s 5,500-acre Waddesdon Manor estate, the house virtually dissolves on a cold-weather afternoon into misty skies and a sparse agricultural landscape.
In fact, the idea for Flint House took root one December day five years ago when Charlotte Skene Catling, cofounder of the architecture firm SCDLP (Skene Catling de la Peña), was walking the site and chanced on nodules of flint that had been churned to the raw surface of the plowed field. Fascinated by the contrast of the rough exterior and the glassy grays and blacks of the stone inside, she and partner Jaime de la Peña made this the leitmotif of a building that draws so deeply on the topography and geology of the site that it looks like a giant cross section of the layers of rock that make up the Earth’s crust.
Flint House is the latest addition to Waddesdon, an ancestral home of the Rothschild banking dynasty and the last surviving Rothschild house out of a total of 42 that is open to the public with its collection intact. Bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957, Waddesdon is still managed by the Rothschild Foundation under the direction of Jacob, the fourth Baron Rothschild, who, in the early 1990s, embarked on an extensive refurbishment of the palatial house, famous for its collection of eighteenth-century French decorative arts, and has been adding to it ever since. Lord Rothschild is a distinguished philanthropist and arts patron whose career has included stints as chair of London’s National Gallery and the Pritzker Architecture Prize committee.
These passions are reflected in Waddesdon’s flamboyant mix of the historic and contemporary, the scholarly and the Pop. Driving from the gatehouse to Flint House, you pass the elegant skeleton of a new visitor pavilion by Carmody Groarke, and the foundation’s HQ and archive building, Windmill Hill, completed in 2011 by Stephen Marshall Architects. Surveying the estate from the brow of a hill is Perceval, by Sarah Lucas, a life-size bronze Shire horse pulling a cart carrying two giant cement marrows.
Located at the lowest point of the estate, Flint House rises from a natural bowl in the landscape where waters drain into a pond, and yet it is a surprising vantage point. “Although it is far down, you can see everything,” says Rothschild, clearly enamored with his latest project. He’s not the only one: In November it received the prized accolade of being named the 2015 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) House of the Year. He points up the hill to the dramatic outlines of Waddesdon Manor, built in the 1870s by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the style of a French Renaissance château. Before Flint House was built, the architect Richard Rogers produced “a wonderful but very different design,” says Rothschild, “more like Philip Johnson’s Glass House, but with panels on the outside that could open and close like petals. The site is all about responding to the geology of the area and nature.”
In fact Flint House, which will serve as a home for visiting scholars to Waddesdon on a new residency program focusing on digital exhibitions, consists of two structures: the main building and a studio annex that mirrors it like a younger sibling. Between them they form a valley, like an inverted pyramid. In terms of antecedents, the architecture draws widely on both ancient and modern references, from Neolithic earthworks, the amphitheaters of ancient Greece, and Mayan ruins, to the iconic stepped silhouette of Casa Malaparte, the spectacular modernist villa on Capri that plays a show-stealing cameo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.
Skene Catling also alludes in her design to the loaded brushstrokes of Frank Auerbach’s visceral portraits and the earthy deposits of Anselm Kiefer’s landscapes; she describes Flint House as having “the rawness of the surrounding fields.” An early rendering of the project that looks uncannily like the finished house represents it in the romantic style of a Rembrandt etching, a flock of dark birds circling its apex.
Waddesdon sits on a chalk seam that dissects Britain from the Norfolk coast to the South Downs and the White Cliffs of Dover. Flint is an ancient material—a crystalline form of the mineral quartz related to jasper, obsidian, and onyx—that occurs as nodules in sedimentary rocks such as chalk. Valued for its strength and ready availability, it has spawned a vernacular architecture that goes back to Roman forts and Norman churches. It has also generated a tradition of eccentric architectural visions that play on the gothic drama of this distinctive rock. (Not far from Waddesdon are the Hell-Fire Caves, a network of chalk and flint caverns excavated in the mid-eighteenth century by the rakish Sir Francis Dashwood, whose notoriously decadent gatherings were rumored to have been held in the caves.) “There’s something so mysterious about flint and the way it is formed underwater,” says Skene Catling. “I love the fact that this extraordinary material is never seen until it is split open. Sometimes you find fossils of sea urchins inside. It’s underwater made visible.”
Since flint is little used as a building material today, a battery of knowledgeable craftsmen was assembled to work on the project, led by David Smith of the Flintman Company, and the rocks were hand-picked and sourced from five different quarries. What’s unusual about the design—Smith notes it is the most ambitious to be attempted in flint since Edwardian times—is that while most buildings stick to one style of flintwork, here six different techniques are used to create the dramatic blend effect. The lowest courses are random rough-hewn black bedrock flint, crudely split as if coming from a fissure in the ground, with large gallets (flakes of flint reminiscent of Neolithic tools) set end on in black mortar joints. Gallets are used “to keep the building alive,” says Smith, “moving like a shoal of fish.” As the house rises, the walls become lighter and smoother, fading through finely snapped grays into layers of white chalk blocks at the top, where it blends into the sky. According to Smith, “the hardest part to achieve was the smooth transition from style to style,” a fading effect echoed in the house’s terrazzo roof.
Besides the geology, Skene Catling was also fascinated by the watery site’s peculiar microclimate and the mosses and rushes growing around the pond: “a strange, still wilderness within the agricultural fields,” as she describes it. This sense of mystery infuses the house with contradictions: It manages to be both monumental and ethereal, dreamy and dramatic. Inside, the living spaces become progressively more private and introspective toward the pond at the house’s north side. Overlooking the water, the study is divided from the sitting room by a river, creating a semi-internalized cave with tall stone walls. The ceiling above this “river” is lined in dark mirror, dissolving divisions between inside and outside in reflections and drawing the landscape into the heart of the building.
In the sitting room, Rothschild, usually a model of aristocratic restraint, becomes quite animated pointing out how the architect has deployed an illusionist’s tricks of smoke and mirrors and optical games. The glass-backed fireplace is positioned so that the flames appear to float on water. Pinpricks of light glitter like fireflies among the coarse flint nodules. The gray stone “bridge” that separates the internal river from the pond is lined in reflective glass, making the river appear much longer. “There was much discussion about this,” says Rothschild. “In the end we felt it was important to make a separation between the pond and the internal watercourse, the natural and the artificial.”
For this new favorite project, Rothschild has assembled an art collection that riffs on its powerful materiality. Above the fireplace is an eighteenth-century painting of the famous Painshill Grotto in Surrey, depicting a diminutive group of figures admiring the cavernous interior dripping with stalactites. It’s set in playful dialogue with the architect’s contemporary version of a grotto behind it. Walking around the house, Rothschild points out other echoes and exchanges between the architecture and artworks: the grid of flinty gray ellipses in a Bridget Riley print in the kitchen; two Chinese marble panels depicting clouds, decorative slices of intensely patterned stone that are as mesmerizingly tactile as the house itself.
“I bought them years ago,” he says. “They seem to fit well here.” And then a curveball: a flock of life-size metallic pink sheep rescued from a Christmas display in a Bond Street store that mirrors the sheep grazing outside—“Jacobs, of course”—and attests to the flights of whimsy that enliven the cultivated Rothschild taste.