Location: Buckinghamshire, UK
Scale: 3-bedroom house, 225sqm
Constraints: Flood zone 3, conservation area, no UK planning precedent
Photography Credits: Darren Chung & Tim Crocker
Featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs, the UK’s first Amphibious House redefines how we live with water. Located on a small island on the River Thames in Buckinghamshire, the project was born from the need to protect homes from extreme flooding without compromising design or heritage. The homeowners wanted to remain connected to the riverside landscape while adhering to Conservation and Environment Agency regulations, inspiring an innovative solution that could rise with the water rather than retreat from it.
The answer became a world-first. Resting gently on the ground in dry weather, the house lifts smoothly within its hidden dock when the river swells, a true amphibious design. Surrounding the property, an intuitive landscape acts as a natural early-warning system: terraced gardens that flood in stages, reeds that sway with the tide, and flexible ‘elephant’ cabling that keeps every service working, even underwater. When the water retreats, the house settles back down, ready for life to carry on uninterrupted.
This award-winning floating home shows that resilience and beauty can coexist. Its three-storey, 225 m² layout sits gracefully within its setting, marrying sustainable architecture with everyday comfort. During the severe winter floods of 2019–2020, the Grand Designs floating house rose and fell exactly as intended, a quiet triumph of design over disaster. The project has since inspired new thinking in flood-resilient and floating architecture across the UK, proving that homes on water can be every bit as grounded in design as those on land.
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We envision large, flood-resilient communities that are designed to thrive in a changing climate. These sustainable developments will combine low-carbon homes with multifunctional landscapes that naturally manage surface water and provide flexible flood storage when needed. Streets of flood-proof houses will sit on higher ground, while amphibious homes and floating architecture will form adaptable edges between land and water.
Our long-term goal is to design climate-adaptive communities that maintain normal life through both droughts and floods. Through ongoing research and award-winning projects, BACA architects are proving that this vision for sustainable architecture in the UK is already becoming a reality.
