This private commission involved the stitching in of a new set piece four bedroom home into a cluster of existing retained brick built farm buildings in a quiet village set deep in the Suffolk countryside.

The key challenge of this brief was to evolve a contemporary architectural language which would sit comfortably within the context of the Suffolk vernacular. The brief was considerable in terms of scale and ambition, calling for four bedrooms and accompanying bathrooms, a cinema room and snug, along with a swimming pool and associated landscaped gardens.

The client also had high sustainability targets, aiming to be entirely off-grid in terms of power generation. The response was to organise the spaces around a landscaped courtyard, placing all the principal living spaces on the ground floor. These areas are collected together in a red brick plinth, which absorbs the form and profile of the existing pig barn and gathers the surrounding buildings to create a courtyard garden. Stacked above these, all four bedrooms and associated bathrooms are placed within a black zinc shell. The form and materials take their cue heavily from the local vernacular, borrowing the steep pitch and colour palette of the traditional tithe barns of the Suffolk countryside. To the east, all spaces open up to the sweeping views of the countryside beyond.