Orchard House

Orchard House occupies a garden that runs down to open water on the West Sussex coast, and the design responds to that setting directly. Randell Design Group, working with West Sussex Carpentry & Building as main contractor, arranged the house as two gabled, timber-clad volumes under standing-seam metal roofs — a form that draws quietly on the boat sheds and barns scattered along this stretch of coast without ever tipping into pastiche. A covered veranda threads along the full garden elevation at ground level, glazed balconies sit above it behind clean glass balustrades, and a detached garden room by the pool restates the same material and proportional language at a smaller scale. Fluid Glass was appointed to deliver the entire glazing package for the house and the garden room together — a single specification carried across more than thirty openings, unified by a marine-grade finish chosen for a garden that meets open water. 

The ground-floor veranda is defined by a run of Fluid Timeless double casement doors, each held to a 25mm glazing bar module that gives the elevation its datum and its rhythm — a proportional discipline more often associated with heritage joinery than with contemporary volumetric massing, and one that sits comfortably against the vertical timber cladding above. Fixed sidelights are introduced at several bays to broaden the opening while preserving that bar spacing, so the enlarged apertures read as an extension of the same grid rather than a departure from it. At the garden room, two door leaves are brought together at a corner with no post between them, dissolving what would ordinarily be a structural junction into a single continuous plane of glass — a detail that only succeeds because the framing gets out of the way at precisely the point the two elevations fold. The same casement language is carried through to first-floor level, giving access to the balconies and holding the tectonic order of the ground floor legible all the way to the eaves. 

Twenty Fluid Timeless windows extend that same glazing bar discipline across the elevations, in side-hung, and fixed arrangements calibrated to each room's aspect and function. The most resolved moment is a corner window with no visible mullion at the return, framing a built-in window seat that looks out over the wildflower meadow — proof that a frameless corner reads as an architectural idea only when the detailing behind it is rigorous enough to disappear. Obscured glazing is deployed with restraint to the bathroom windows, admitting daylight while holding privacy without recourse to blinds or films, and a disciplined sequence of fixed and side-hung casements along the upper gables gives the bedrooms a consistent outlook that never disrupts the coursing of the cladding. 

The single most resolved moment in the glazing scheme is a fixed, glass-to-glass corner window in the living room, where two panes meet directly at the return with no mullion between them. It's a detail that depends entirely on restraint — the frame has to disappear at exactly the point the two elevations fold, and here it does, so the corner reads as an uninterrupted wrap of glass rather than two windows meeting at a post. Positioned to look out over the pool and the garden room beyond, it turns what could have been a conventional outlook into a considered piece of composition, framing the pool house as a deliberate object within the view rather than something glimpsed at an angle.

Two Fluid X Sliding Door installations handle the widest, most performative openings in the scheme, each doing a different job for a different room. The larger, a four-pane, two-track door spanning just over six metres, sits in the kitchen and opens the principal living space directly onto the garden — Fluid Glass's flagship sliding system, with 21mm sightlines, a flush colour-matched handle, and a concealed threshold, specified here for maximum openness onto the widest expanse of lawn. The smaller, a two-pane version of the same system, serves the master bedroom, sliding back to give access onto a private balcony with its own uninterrupted view over the garden. Both were installed on the system's optional hidden rail, removing the last visible datum line at the base of each opening so the glazing reads as an unbroken plane from floor to head regardless of scale. Given its exposure hard against the pool terrace below, the kitchen door's glass was heat soak tested to guard against spontaneous breakage, and an integrated slot drain was built into its threshold — a practical response to what is, by some margin, the most heavily used and most exposed opening on the plan.

The full glazing package is finished in a bespoke matt near-black, RAL 7021M, specified in place of Fluid Glass's standard anthracite or jet black to give the frames a softer, more graphite quality against the pale timber cladding — a small departure from the standard palette that recalibrates the whole elevation. Ironmongery throughout is Fluid's Art Deco lever handle, powder-coated to match and fitted with equal discipline to every door and window, so the hardware reads as an extension of the frame rather than an applied afterthought. Over all of it sits a marine-grade coating, specified in recognition of a garden that runs directly to open water and intended to hold its finish against salt-laden air well beyond the usual design life of a coastal installation. 

Orchard House demonstrates what a genuinely unified glazing specification can achieve at scale: one casement system, one window system, one sliding door, held to a consistent glazing bar module, a single matt-black finish and one hardware language across the veranda, the upper floors and the garden room by the pool. The frameless corner door and the mullion-free corner window are the moments where that discipline becomes most visible, but the real achievement is the restraint sustained across all thirty-plus openings — a marine-grade specification, calibrated for a coastal garden, that gives the house its calm, coherent presence from every elevation.

Orchard House was highly commended in the Sussex Heritage Trust Small Scale Residential: New Build Awards

Architect: Randell Design Group
Main Contractor: West Sussex Carpentry & Building
Glazing: Fluid Glass
Photography: Julia Toms Photography