Faith House, Poole

The charitable trust works in a small group of farm houses and buildings constructed between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. About five years ago a respite centre was added designed by the local architect Ken Morgan, which is effectively a hotel for disabled people.

The work by Tony Fretton Architects consisted of making a simple masterplan, with new buildings for the arts and spirituality, and realising the first of these, Faith House. In the longer term Holton Lee will build artist studios, a small centre for performing arts and a building for researching and archiving works of disability arts.

Faith House provides a small room for individual contemplation; a larger space for religious assembly, meetings and displays of art; and an entrance where people can take tea between events or shelter from the rain. The building has a prefabricated timber frame with a small number of steel elements, insulation of recycled paper, unpainted red cedar cladding and a green roof. It is conceived as a symbol of Holton Lee's work, something the client specifically required.

The new building is located at the back of the garden of the original Farm House on a small rise surrounded by trees. This is the quitest part of the estate. The back of the building is tight to the wire fence that separates the cultivated garden from the agricultural fields. The windows of the larger room look out across these fields towards the sea. The main front faces a road which leads in a straight line away to the estate entrance. From this side you can see right through the building to the sky and fields behind.

The three main facades are serial and abstract, yet full of familiar motifs and designed in relation to their outlook and location. The front facade is a filled portico. The left-hand bay is an open porch that leads through a dscrete door into the quiet room which is painted silver and contains cut trees in a ring with a separate garden behind. The central bay is filled with a single sheet of glass though which the lobby looks out o­nto the garden. The right-hand bay is blank, filled with timber boarding.

The facade towards the garden of the respite centre is an open sun porch. A door in the centre allows the large room to be used from this side for special ocassions such as a weddding or garden party. The rest of the the time it may stay shut like the door of a church in southern Europe. The facade facing the fields is intended to be like an animal seen across the fields. For the ceiling of the two porticos and the quiet room the artist Diego Ferrari will make a mural consisting of enalrged photographs of the sky.