The UK countryside holds enduring appeal. As of May 2025, according to the British government, around 10 million people live in rural England and, since mid-2020, their numbers have been growing faster than in urban areas. The picture is similar in Scotland and Wales.
New arrivals seek peace and quiet, plus a more connected lifestyle. As London-based architect David Money, who has led his own practice since 2002, puts it, they’re after ‘access to nature, long views over water and hills – experiences that you can’t get in cities’. The best rural homes, he says, ‘have really strong landscape connections. The untamed imperfections of gardens feed into the architecture, giving the building an earthy quality.’
This means that context, landscape, sustainability and materiality now guide rural architectural design more than ever. Money calls this a ‘tailored response to a set of unique circumstances’. A younger generation of architects is taking these principles further. Despite VAT rules that favour new builds, adaptive and material reuse is becoming the norm, and traditional building crafts are being revived.
What's everyone reading?
‘Clients ask significantly more about material origin and the carbon footprint of building techniques than they typically do in the city,’ says Nico Warr, founder of Finch. ‘There has been a noticeable shift towards the use of natural materials.’ Finch’s Longhouse, an annex to a 1930s seaside cottage in West Sussex, exemplifies this approach. Its copper-clad, ribbed timber vaults evoke upturned Viking ships. Inside, Scandinavian spruce arches are paired with cedar planks salvaged from a 100-year-old barn. Leather panels and cork cupboards continue the themes of sustainability and longevity.
A more local and subtler, but equally tactile, approach is seen in The Makers Barn, a wonderfully contemporary home by young practice Hutch, located in an old piggery set amid wild grassland. Its pitched roof nods to nearby Tudor cottages, while ‘the design uses local materials such as timber, clay and lime plasters, and English elm joinery’, says architect Craig Hutchinson. The home’s central concrete chimney, with its rough board marks made by timber, recalls both brutalism and rustic stonework. The aim, Hutchinson says, was to create a building that ‘feels organically tied to the land’.
Glasgow-based Colin Baillie, who co-founded Baillie Baillie with his partner Megan in 2019, echoes this view: ‘Using local materials speaks directly to a connection with place.’ Their Highland-cottage project Iorram features a steep roof with low eaves, lime-harled walls, clay plaster and terracotta tiles, while locally sourced Douglas fir is used throughout, including as offcuts repurposed for the kitchen cabinets to help minimise waste. ‘We’re drawn to low-tech methods of making, and simple ways to inhabit space,’ Baillie adds.
This emphasis on material and craft complements rather than replaces the traditional sustainability strategies centred on energy efficiency (such as Passivhaus principles). At Bury Gate Farm in Sussex, architect Sandy Rendel has included on-site renewable energy, enabling the home to operate in a carbon-negative way. But he argues for a ‘more holistic definition of sustainability, including embodied energy, design life and durability, tolerance to changing needs and wellbeing benefits that come with natural, breathable materials’.
There is also an evolution in thinking about the land as well as the buildings. ‘There’s more demand for working gardens,’ says Fiona McLean of McLean Quinlan, who has designed homes from her Winchester studio for more than 40 years. At Downland Barns in the North Downs, the clients planted fruit trees and a kitchen garden with raised beds, complementing the agricultural character of the historic barn. The building’s double-height volume now serves as an open-plan living space with a strong indoor-outdoor connection.
Hutchinson also notes the growing importance of landscape design. ‘We’re seeing more requests for natural swimming pools, outdoor saunas, and gardens designed for both connection and retreat,’ he says.
Rural projects can come with extra challenges. ‘Wildlife protection of bats, newts and birds shapes how we approach siting and materials,’ explains Hutchinson. ‘Planning can be complicated,’ agrees Niall Maxwell of Rural Office in Carmarthen, Wales. ‘There’s resistance to development due to landscape impact or AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) status.’ Most projects are therefore based in settlements, or they adapt existing buildings. His studio’s Delfyd Farm in the Gower Peninsula extends a two-storey Victorian farmhouse with three single-storey larch-clad wings, enhancing the formal simplicity of the original property.
Despite these restrictions and possible pitfalls, architects agree that rural-planning departments are increasingly ambitious about sustainability and design quality. ‘There’s a growing recognition of the need for buildings to sit sensitively within the landscape, using local materials and meeting high environmental standards,’ says McLean. An additional driver of design quality is a loophole in English planning law that allows the construction of new homes in the open countryside if they’re of exceptional design quality, which is often referred to as Paragraph 84. Rarely used, this clause sometimes enables clients and architects to realise ambitious feats of design.
Hugh Scott Moncrieff, creative director at Cake Architecture, best known for its sophisticated hospitality spaces in London, is currently pursuing such a scheme in Essex. The Oak House will sit on a site, once home to a farmstead demolished after the war, that lies beyond the village boundary. ‘We’ll be using ultra-local materials: brick, flint, chalk, oak,’ he says, pointing out that the project aims to have a ‘radically low-embodied carbon footprint’. The oak, sourced from a nearby woodland, will form the primary structure, while landscape upgrades are also being explored.
Whether or not Cake’s Oak House will be built remains to be seen (although this writer is a fan), but it seems that, for once, all the factors are coalescing to allow the current generation of architects to deliver distinct, quietly beautiful and sustainable homes that will enrich their communities for many years to come.
