An Architectural First: The Sliding House

Click on the Thumbnails to See The House In Motion

When most people get tired of their home, or things feel a bit stale, we rearrange furniture and add in a few new throw pillows. But for this UK homeowner it isn't the decor that is easily changed, it's the structure of the house itself that can be modified on a whim. What appears to be the walls and roof of the building is really a "slide-able shell" that changes the layout of the home. Click through the jump to see how it all works!

While reading up on things over at Inhabitat, we ran across this simple, yet secretive and slightly deceiving barn style house. What appears to be a straight forward design of wood and glass is really something of an architectural first. The house, for lack of a better technical term, slides.

The feat was accomplished by dRMM Architecture for a client looking for a place to retire to (we should all be so lucky) that was sustainable and allowed him to grow his own food. The house consists of three buildings all in a row with a garage off to the side. A shell is then able to move back and forth across the three buildings on a track as needed. This allows the homeowner to adjust things not only as the weather changes (wouldn't it be nice to swim in your outdoor pool while it's raining?), but throughout the day to help heat and cool the home naturally with just the flick of a switch. (You can watch a timelapse video of the process downloadable from their site)

Spending the later part of our life in a movable home made of red rubber, wood and glass sounds like a fantastic way to spend our time. We're excited about this new take of having a roof over our heads and think it should be a great idea to watch going forward.

Read more at Inhabitat or from dRMM. And you can even see the sliding house in action over at Unplggd!

Photos courtesy of dRMM

Comments (18)

that is the coolest thing ever!

My family has the same thing our on compound - but we just use trailers.

that is really something and its beautiful.

Beautiful. I wonder how the tracks work with snow and ice in winter?

Genius!! Ridiculously, in a good way, cool.

Wonder if that would work for schools/universities that have to grow and flex to accommodate different numbers of students, numbers of classrooms, and activities all the time . . .

I'd want to see the INSIDE in all the variations before getting excited.

I guess I don't see this being worth the inevitible engineering price. Maybe community spaces could benefit from something like this, but I think it would be much, much cheaper to just built one space the largest possible size this can make, and go from there. Flexibility in space arrangement should have a real purpose. The engineering here is amazing and impressive, but functionally I am skeptical. It might be a prototype for something that actually HAS functionality, but this version just seems cool but useless...

What has this got to do with apartmenttherapy?

Seems unnecessarily complex. I mean.... repainting once in a while usually does the trick for me.

I agree with SherryBinNH.

This is very cool-looking, but the house stays the same; it's just the external blanket that slides, right? So I don't really see how it changes the living space - it seems to functionally just change the way the space is insulated and lit.

I'm guessing that without the sliding shell, the space could have been designed with uber-efficient heating and cooling systems, and could have been heated and cooled for many years for less than the cost of designing, building, powering, and maintaining this shell.

Mind you, none of that is a reason not to try something like this. It is very cool-looking. I'm just not sure it's a big step in functionality or environmental construction.

Since it's in the UK, snow and ice are less of a concern than they would be in the states, though this year....