Award-winning architecture: inside a remarkable self-built modern house inside a 'boat' with views over Poole harbour

‘It’s called the Houseboat, because it is a boat with a house inside it,’ says architect Roger Zogolovitch of his extraordinary award-winning home shaped like two upended half hulls.
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Architect and developer Roger Zogolovitch sweeps an arm across a wide view of Poole Harbour in Dorset.

It takes in a house that he and his wife, Carola, use as a retreat from their London home near Zogolovitch’s offices.

He can commute when he wants — the fast train takes two hours and five minutes.

The house is like nothing you’ve ever seen.

It’s shaped like two upended half boat hulls joined together and covered in curved black larch laths, uneven along the bottom.

This structure perches on low concrete walls.

It is like some slightly battered rowing boat that’s been chopped in half on a beach to leave one end bigger than the other, with the two halves propped on a sea wall.

Roger Zogolovitch in the Houseboat (Rory Gardiner )
Rory Gardiner

At any moment Mr Peggotty, the upturned-boat dweller of Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, might pop out of the front door.

Zogolovitch designed it with a tracery of metal and plaques of copper.

“It’s called the Houseboat, because it is a boat with a house inside it.” He grins.

With a front garden of grass and flowers, this extraordinary house has won the RIBA’s Stephen Lawrence Prize. Which isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is Zogolovitch got another architect to design it; Meredith Bowles of Mole, a practice winning awards for innovative, quirky, and site-responsive houses.

Zogolovitch enjoys working with other architects. “You work collaboratively, resulting in great ideas.”

His system hasn’t failed him yet and has also helped him to develop the distinctive split-level housing of his firm, SolidSpace.

He bought the plot for his house in the Eighties. He and Carola had spotted the hilltop with pines and a Thirties house.

WHAT IT COST 

  • The 2,431sq ft house cost £750,000 to build in 2016.
  • The couple already owned the land.
  • Today the house, freehold, is worth about £2 million.

Carola says: “Roger had just bought an old Citroën by putting his card under a windscreen wiper, so he put his card through the letter box.”

The trick worked again, the owner came back to him and — eventually — sold it. As well as the Thirties house, which the couple then had listed, there was enough land to build a new house.

Over the next 18 years, Zogolovitch asked several architects to do designs, and got planning permission.

Around 2006, Meredith Bowles did “some beautiful sketches, and a model, that set it all out”.

Split levels: the signature layout of Solidspace (Rory Gardiner )
Rory Gardiner

From those grew a timber-frame house made off-site using huge Douglas fir beams about 8in square in section; aggregate concrete, with stones; two vast vertical windows facing the sea, one in each half of the broken boat; walnut floors, and Zogolovitch ’s trademark split levels, which somehow make more out of any given volume.

He went to planning with the Bowles design, which was enthusiastically passed and the house took two years to build.

Zogolovitch was very involved with the interior, buying glass handles for kitchen units in Parisian flea markets, choosing coloured laminate for worktops and cupboard fronts, and for the wardrobes, Ikea but fronted in beautiful riverine-patterned laminate. He found the Murano glass green chandelier in Paris’s Clignancourt flea market and chose the lustrous mosaic tiles in the bathrooms. The result is spectacular.

The house sleeps 10 and has three bathrooms. There’s a huge kitchen-diner with great views, plus a terrace and a ballroom-size sitting room.

A concrete-lined pantry under the stairs is always cool; an airing cupboard with a little radiator is always warm and has cedar battens to smell nice and repel moths.

The boot room also has a radiator, beneath a hook for coats damp with spray.

The materials are expensive — solid walnut, tree-size bits of Douglas fir — but they will last forever.

Views over Poole: you can see the harbour from the house (Rory Gardiner )
Rory Gardiner

“Spend where it matters, on the structure,” advises Zogolovitch. “Spend less on kitchens and bathrooms, because you’ll change them.”

This house feels hefty, but also light, because of the soaring windows divided with strong muntins clad with copper that will go chalky green, and because of the sheer volume of air.

The concrete central section joining the hulls has an oculus to the sky, and the stairs have a bespoke metal balustrade to let maximum light through.

Zogolovitch first visited Poole aged six to stay with his grandparents. Now his own grandchildren can stay and let their imaginations set sail.

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