A Somerset Farmhouse

Our work here has been to provide significant extensions and alternations to a stone-built farmhouse in Somerset. Surrounded by fine agricultural buildings, including a listed barn, the farmhouse had been extended during the 1960s and 70s in an architecturally unsympathetic way.

Our proposal removes these extensions and creates a new wing in the early Georgian manner that will effectively turn the building into a small Manor Farm. Fine paneled rooms and a new painted timber staircase will be constructed. A wider scheme of landscape improvements is now being put in place.

Construction is now underway and due for completion in 2019.

Remodeled Manor House

At a beautiful site above Beaminster, in West Dorset, we are working on a major remodeling of a recently constructed house (completed in 2000) that lacks character and is very poorly planned and detailed.

In the building’s favour, it has a sensational location, with fine views in every direction and a south-facing main elevation – not always the case in Dorset. Moreover the scale and shape of the existing house was not without merit. As is so often the way, its failings were in the detail – making for a building that could and should have been beautiful, but was in fact dull, lifeless and without character.

Over a period of several months we have developed a re-working of the internal layouts to make a much better-planned family home, and developed ideas for the complete remodeling of the exterior which will involve construction of new stone mullioned bay windows, incorporation of new stone and leaded light windows throughout, replacement of the poor quality slate roof and demolition of a large and ill-sited conservatory to form a new much smaller garden room attached to the house.

We have worked alongside the landscape architect Pip Morrison to create a much finer setting for the house, and which links the building to the wider landscape through a series of low terraced walls and classic English borders.

A New Farm house

We were asked to develop proposals for a new house at the centre of an agricultural estate in Oxfordshire.

The clients’ initial aspiration was to build a replacement dwelling on the site of some 1930s workers cottages, but following our engagement we turned our attention to a beautiful but neglected group of farm buildings nearby. These centered around a fine unlisted 18th century barn, which had a series of modern agricultural sheds and silos attached.

We developed proposals with the landscape architect Kim Wilkie for a new wing to the barn and the conversion of the grain silos to accommodation. The new building was designed in a subtle contemporary arts and crafts approach, subservient to the main structure, which created a generous 5 bedroom family house with extensive outbuildings.The barn was retained as an unconverted space.