Malator House, also known as House in Wales, is an earth-sheltered dwelling by Future Systems set into a hillside above Druidston Haven in Pembrokeshire. Completed in 1998, the house reduces its presence within the protected coastal landscape by burying its domestic program beneath a planted turf roof, while a continuous glazed facade opens the single-room interior toward St Brides Bay.
Malator House Technical Information
- ArchitectsFuture Systems
- LocationDruidston Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, United Kingdom
- Project YearsMid-1990s – 1998
- Photographs© Trevor Patt
The objective was to minimise the visual impact of the building and to site it so that the house would read as a natural part of the landscape.
– Future Systems
Landscape Constraint and Architectural Disappearance
Malator House occupies a sensitive site within Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, above Druidston Haven and facing the broad horizon of St Brides Bay. The project replaced a dilapidated wooden shack, formerly an army barracks, but the restrictions of the protected landscape made any visible new construction difficult to justify. Future Systems responded by treating the hillside not as a backdrop but as the primary architectural material. The dwelling is excavated into the slope, with the ground wrapping around its rear and sides to form enclosure, insulation, and visual concealment.
The turf roof extends the surrounding coastal ground plane across the top of the house. From the landward approach, the building is nearly erased, registering only as a low mound with occasional service elements breaking the grass line. This strategy avoids the picturesque language often associated with rural assimilation. Instead of imitating local vernacular forms, the house disappears through section, topography, and continuity of surface. Its relationship to context is therefore not one of stylistic deference, but of physical absorption.
The seaward facade is the only elevation where the architecture becomes legible. Here the hillside is cut open and filled with a long sheet of frameless glazing, divided by slender vertical members and punctuated by circular vents that recall marine and aerospace detailing. The effect is less a conventional frontage than a sectional incision, exposing a domestic cavity within the earth. The glass wall concentrates view, light, and orientation into a single gesture, turning the buried house outward toward the bay while maintaining its near-invisibility from the landscape above.
Single Volume Plan and Interior Continuity
The plan of Malator rejects the subdivision typical of the single-family house. Rather than arranging rooms along corridors, Future Systems organized the dwelling as one continuous open-plan volume, with sleeping, living, cooking, and bathing functions placed within a shared spatial field. This gives the house the character of a compact communal hall rather than a sequence of private compartments. The comparison is not historical in appearance, but spatial: a single room gathers the household around light, fire, and view.
Programmatic differentiation is achieved through freestanding service pods rather than walls. The kitchen and bathroom are treated as inserted objects, brightly colored and prefabricated, stopping short of the ceiling so that the curved roof surface remains uninterrupted. Their placement defines domestic zones and partially screens sleeping areas, but they do not compromise the perception of the interior as one continuous volume. This distinction is central to the project: enclosure is produced by the earth and roof shell, while occupation is organized by objects within that enclosure.
The central hearth reinforces the hall-like organization of the plan. Positioned near the middle of the house, it gathers seating and domestic activity around a point of warmth while preserving the uninterrupted sightline toward the sea. Behind it, the ground retains the house; in front, the glazed facade opens the room to St Brides Bay. The interior is therefore structured by a simple spatial polarity: earth at the back, horizon at the front. The curved ceiling mediates between these conditions, softening the sense of burial and giving the modest domestic program a larger spatial amplitude.
Shell Structure, Prefabrication, and Technical Logic
The technical ambition of Malator lies in the relationship between earth construction and lightweight shell thinking. The roof is conceived as a stressed-skin plywood aerofoil, an assembly that draws on aircraft and boat-building methods rather than conventional domestic carpentry. This structural logic allows the roof to span the main volume without internal columns, preserving the continuous reading of the plan. The white-painted underside of the shell is not a decorative finish applied after the fact; it is the visible spatial expression of the structural idea.
Loads are carried around the perimeter by a continuous retaining wall and steel ring beam. This arrangement enables the rear and sides of the excavated house to function as both structure and ground-retaining enclosure, while leaving the interior free of load-bearing elements. The result is a hybrid condition: part bunker, part hull, part cave. The house uses the mass of the hillside for anchorage and buffering, but its roof and interior language belong to a different technical lineage, one associated with mobility, prefabrication, and curved monocoque forms.
Prefabrication was also a pragmatic response to the fragility of the site. Components were produced off-site and assembled within the excavated hillside, reducing construction traffic and limiting disturbance to the protected landscape. The kitchen and bathroom pods make this approach explicit. Built as complete, spray-painted units, they introduce precision and autonomy into the open volume. Their object-like presence clarifies the difference between the stable, earth-bound shell and the inserted domestic apparatus housed within it.
Material Contrast and Environmental Mediation
Malator depends on a deliberate collision of material registers. Slate flooring grounds the interior in the geology and subdued tones of the Welsh coast, while the planted turf roof extends the living landscape over the building. Against these darker, heavier surfaces, the service pods introduce vivid synthetic color, including the yellow fiberglass pod visible through the seaward glazing. The contrast is not incidental. It exposes the house’s dual identity as both a primitive shelter and a technological object.
The environmental strategy is similarly direct. Earth sheltering moderates temperature, reduces exposure to coastal wind, and uses the surrounding ground as a protective buffer. The planted roof slows rainwater runoff and stabilizes the visual continuity of the hillside, while the glazed facade gathers daylight and frames the principal view. Ventilation is concentrated along this seaward edge through circular operable openings, whose detailing reinforces the project’s marine references. The house does not present itself as an environmental manifesto, but its section, massing, and envelope make climate mediation inseparable from form.
The curved white ceiling plays a critical role in this mediation. Without it, the buried interior might read as heavy or cave-like; with it, the space becomes continuous, thin-skinned, and almost aerodynamic. The saturated pods intensify this reading, setting artificial color against the dark slate floor and grass-covered exterior. Future Systems used these contrasts to avoid two conventional outcomes: a rustic earth house absorbed into nostalgia, and a high-tech object imposed on a protected site. Malator instead operates between those positions, using disappearance as an architectural strategy while allowing its interior to remain openly synthetic, precise, and spatially experimental.
About Future Systems
Future Systems was a London architecture practice founded in 1979 by Jan Kaplicky. For its first decade, the office was known for visionary, largely unbuilt research into organic, monocoque-shell structures drawn from aircraft, car, and boat design. Amanda Levete joined as a partner in 1989, and through the 1990s, the practice moved from paper architecture into built work, producing projects such as Malator, the NatWest Media Center at Lord’s Cricket Ground, and the Selfridges department store in Birmingham.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: Bob Marshall-Andrews QC and Gill Marshall-Andrews
- Other contributors: Photography by Trevor Patt
- Research references or publications: Marcus Field, Future Systems, London: Phaidon Press, 1999
- Research references or publications: T. Driver, Pembrokeshire: Historic Landscapes from the Air, RCAHMW, 2007
