Athron Hill

Athron Hill is an ambitious new housing development constructed on a brown-field site in the foothills of the Ochil’s, snuggled into a sheltering woodland and afforded majestic views over Loch Leven, the Lomond Hills and the Pentlands to the south. This unique setting was once home to a tuberculosis sanatorium, which took advantage of the fresh air and sunshine found on the hills. It had stood empty since the late 1980’s and was demolished back in 2003.

Historic clachans and townships evident across the Scottish landscape were finely tuned to climate and landscape. New housing developments often neglect such simple principles. At Athron Hill, forms are tuned to exploit views and to mitigate the visual impact on the skyline. The new infrastructure of roads, tracks, lighting, and services are sensitively integrated into the landscape. Roaming pathways are enhanced, with a network of new bridleways stitched across the hillside, exploiting the existing pond, woodland, fields and reservoir, and connecting to a new orchard for the community to share. Creating this rural community, integrated into its rich landscape, demanded a hard-won and imaginative response from Planning and Roads officers to ensure orthodox roads, kerbing and street lighting didn’t turn Athron Hill from a woodland community into a suburb-on-the-hill.

The new homes are then clustered together along the hillside, gardens merge with roads to create a continuous rural ground plane, and forms are embedded within the trees, connecting them to the wider landscape. To avoid a ‘scorched earth’ approach on the challenging steeply sloping site, the sections of the new homes step with the topography, opening up to the views and creating greater volumes within living spaces. The homes either follow an ‘L’ shape or ‘slipped’ plan to create sheltered entrance and garden courts and forming snugs that exploit the views.

The material palette has been informed by the surrounding agricultural context. Standing seam metal is used as a nod to the utilitarian forms of the nearby farm sheds, with alternative colours selected to create subtle variation across the site. Larch rainscreen cladding wraps the timber-frame homes, which is weathering and softening over time against the hillside. The timber forms are placed on robust masonry plinths, rooting them to the ground.

We believe Athron Hill stands in resistance to the more ubiquitous new housing developments across Scotland’s built landscape. We hope the result will be viewed as an exemplar for future rural communities.