Hand-cleft oak shingles cloak wellbeing centre in Hertforshire by Okra
Irregular oak shingles that double as habitats for bugs and bats cover the exterior of The Apple House, an education and wellbeing hub in Hertfordshire, UK, by London design collective Okra.
Located in Serge Hill, The Apple House is designed for local community interest company The Serge Hill Project, which aims to demonstrate how people's lives and wellbeing can be transformed through working with nature.
Housed within the centre's barn-like volume is a multi-purpose learning and workshop space, a kitchen and an office, which overlook a vegetable garden and educational "plant library" through large windows.
Okra chose the rough, hand-cleft oak shingles to cover the exterior of The Apple House as part of a material palette that looked to showcase the potential of local, natural materials, including a spruce timber frame, hempcrete and clay and straw bricks.
The project was recently shortlisted in the leisure and wellness project category of Dezeen Awards 2025.
"We wanted to explore what could be done with natural materials immediately available to the site in a way that is resourceful, practical and beautiful," Okra co-founder Ben Stuart-Smith told Dezeen.
"Above ground and excluding its corrugated aluminium roof, The Apple House is made entirely from natural materials," added Stuart-Smith.
"It takes a traditional barn form with a 45-degree-pitch black corrugated roof, meaning that from afar it looks like a typical agricultural building. But as you approach, the building is revealed as something more complex, crafted and expressive."
The external shingles of The Apple House were all created from oak trees felled in nearby overcrowded areas, cut to lengths that could be processed entirely by hand. The gaps created by the wavy, irregular forms of the shingles double as habitats for bugs and bats.
These shingles cloak a spruce frame that forms the building's structure, infilled with hempcrete to create its external walls. Internal partitions were created using birch ply panels, incorporating a large storage wall behind the kitchen.
A wall of folding wooden doors enables this kitchen to be closed off from the multi-purpose hall, while shutters in the office above mediate its connection to the rest of the centre.
The floor of The Apple House was created in collaboration with natural materials expert Will Stanwix, taking clay and straw bricks, or "strocks" produced by local brickmaker H G Matthews, and cutting them in half to create tiles that were then sealed with linseed oil.
Due to a one-metre level change across the site, the centre sits partially on a brick plinth to keep the building's ground floor on one level, with the perimeter paths and ramps configured to ensure accessibility.
The plant library that surrounds the centre was created by landscape practice Tom Stuart-Smith Studio and includes over 1,500 different varieties of plants, intended to be used as an educational resource for anyone interested in plants and planting design.
Other buildings recently featured on Dezeen that make use of local, natural materials include Hedeskov Living Lab in Denmark by Djernes & Bell, which features a palette including local hemp, clay, sand and timber.
Van Laethem Architecten also used both shingles and hempcrete to create its own garden studio in Belgium.
The photography is by Nick Dearden.
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