Flimsy Works designed and built a fully-insulated shed for a valley in Carmathenshire, Wales. This provides a temporary space to work and stay on this remote off-grid site, whose biodiversity is being gradually enhanced through careful management of its ecosystems.
The site has limited access and infrastructure, so our approach was to use a modular timber frame and cladding panels that could be prefabricated off-site and assembled by hand on-site. The cladding panels were designed to make use of the variety of widths of wood reclaimed from the film industry by ReCollective, which were given different painted treatments to create variety and character for the shed’s exterior. White-coloured horizontal ‘handles’ were added to each panel for easier handling, enabling us to simply lift the panels one-by-one into place on a system of facade rails.
One face of the shed sits tall and proud amongst other agricultural buildings, whilst the other face bows down to the valley with a roof overhang that provides extra weather protection.
We kept the interior as lean as possible, using the structural plywood as the finish itself. The structural rafters project through the ceiling soffit and guide the users’ eye towards a panaromic view of the valley, framed by the exposed structural columns. A continuous platform provides a place to lie down, sit, work, look or read, and pops up at the end of the shed for standing tasks, such as cooking.