Unique animal design tips the scales to win TV fame

The dream home of first-time self-builder Lynn Pratt, featured on Kevin McCloud’s Channel 4 Grand Designs series, The Street, last year as one of several self-build houses with bold and cutting-edge architectural designs.

More than just a house, the design and shape were intended to conjure up the idea of a creature or a crouched animal. To give it a sense of an inhabited body, the structure was wrapped in a carapace or shell—a concept that gave the house its name (otherwise known as a ‘scaly anteater’).

To achieve the seamless curved look, cloaked verges, bespoke external angles and mansard tiles were used to neatly make the transition from the roof to the walls.

The distinctive tiled roof and walls (resonant of animal scales) were central to the design, with Staffordshire blue plain clay tiles covering the pitched roof and continuing down the walls all the way to the ground at the sides and the back of the house. On the front elevation, a timber ‘roundel’ extending from the tiles reminds Lynn of the Oast houses where she grew up in Kent.

Kevin McCloud described Pangolin as ‘architecturally right out there and beautifully designed’.

Manufacturer: Dreadnought Tiles