Lime-rendered stone
Walls between sixty centimetres and a metre thick, rendered in lime so they breathe. They take all day to warm through and give it back overnight, which is what keeps the rooms at twenty-four degrees.
The Estate
Everything here was placed by watching a shadow.
Nine hectares, five buildings, forty-one palms and a rainwater cistern from the 1890s that still carries a third of our load.
The land
A farm, then a ruin, then this.
Coconut and citrus until 1974. Abandoned for thirty years, which is the only reason the palms survived — nobody was here to clear them.
When we started in 2009 the arcade was standing, the cistern was intact and the rest was rubble. We spent the first summer doing nothing but recording where the shade fell, hour by hour, through June and August. The plan came out of that survey and not the other way round.
Two of the five buildings sit on old footings. The other three were sited to catch the canopy at the hours people actually use them: breakfast in the east arcade, the long table in the courtyard, and the west terrace held for late afternoon.
Shade study
Where to sit, at any hour.
Move the sun through the day and watch it fall. This is the same survey we built the estate from, simplified to the five places you are most likely to want.
14:00
sun 58° above the horizon
Computed for 21 June, the worst case. In April and October the shaded hours run roughly forty minutes longer at each end.
Building
Four materials, chosen for temperature.
None of this is a style decision. Each one is here because of what it does to the inside of a room in August.
Chestnut shutters
Solid, external, on every opening. Shutters outside the glass stop the heat before it enters; shutters inside only trap it. Closed by the housekeepers at eleven and opened again at six.
Reed and cane
The terrace roofs are cane laid over chestnut poles, cut on the estate. They drop the temperature underneath by five or six degrees and are replaced in sections every four years.
Unglazed clay floors
Fired locally, laid over sand with no membrane. They stay cold underfoot and they take up water in the wet months instead of sweating it back at you.
Water
The cistern still works.
The 1890s rainwater system under the west court was never decommissioned. We relined it in 2012 and reconnected the roof runs.
Last winter it carried thirty-one per cent of the estate's water. Grey water from the rooms goes to the palms and the citrus; the kitchen garden is on drip from a second tank. The pool is salt, not chlorine, and it is emptied once a year rather than continuously backwashed.
- Cistern
- 240 m³
- Of our load
- 31%
- Relined
- 2012
- Solar
- 62 kWp