Timber
House Oxford

The house

Built in wood, and it shows

It suits groups of up to eight who want their own front door: two families sharing, a research team, parents visiting for graduation, or a family relocating between houses. What people notice first is that it's detached and set back from the road — no shared walls, no traffic outside the bedroom windows — and then how close it still is to everything. Cowley Road's restaurants are a two-minute walk at the end of the street, Iffley Road the other way, and the city centre is about twenty minutes on foot over Magdalen Bridge.

The Timber House is a modern four-bedroom house set back from Bullingdon Road, behind the Victorian terraces — larch-clad above, painted brick below, with gates onto its own off-street parking. The ground floor is a single open room: a kitchen with gas hob, double oven and a breakfast bar with four stools at one end, and a sitting area with a corner sofa at the other, under a large flat rooflight that keeps the room bright even when the sky isn't. Sliding doors open onto an enclosed paved patio with a bench and a gravel bed of young pines. Upstairs and off the landing are four double bedrooms — pale wood beds, two with a desk under the window — and two bathrooms, one with a rainfall shower over a tiled enclosure, the other a shower room built against an exposed brick wall.