Just outside London, flanking a woodland and facing rolling hills and fields to the south, sits a home that was once an unlovely barn occupied by farm animals. Its current owners, a professional couple, wanted to turn the outbuilding into a boutique holiday retreat. Friends recommended Hutch, the architecture and interiors firm who designed their Hackney mews house.
‘It was a simple masonry, concrete and asbestos construction in terrible condition,’ recalls the firm’s co-founder, architect and interior designer Craig Hutchinson. Partial demolition and structural alterations were required to make it habitable, but the bigger challenge was to make this small, 65-square-metre building, says Craig, ‘spacious, comfortable and relaxing’.
He presented his clients with an unconventional proposition for ‘The Makers Barn’ as the project came to be known.
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Rather than dividing the structure into compartmentalised rooms or treating it as a single open floor plan (which, counter-intuitively, would have made it feel smaller), he suggested wrapping a free-flowing space around an oversized central concrete fireplace and chimney, with a sunken bath and shower under a roof-light to give the feeling of bathing outside.
‘It was important that "The Makers Barn" had a connection to its place, as if it had always been there,’ Craig says. Thick-plastered walls, pronounced timber columns and a larch-timber-clad roof that will weather silver-grey all pay homage to the surrounding thatched Tudor cottages without being a mock replica of them.
Floor-to-ceiling glazing further enhances the connection to the landscape, and the house is decorated with organic, earthy raw tones borrowed from its surroundings.
‘We placed an emphasis on crafted, sustainable and natural materials, including end-grain parquet flooring and English-elm joinery,’ Craig says, adding, ‘combining hard and soft, the luxurious and the humble are signatures of our approach. This gives a pared-back but still relaxing and comfortable outcome with warmth and texture.’
Craig designed a kitchen with enough storage to allow guests to be self-sufficient for up to a week, but not so much that it overpowered the building’s compact footprint. In the end, however, his clients were so thrilled with the finished result that they decided to shelve their holiday-retreat plan and move in themselves.
This subtle, elegant sanctuary is a perfect fit for its location and one that makes just as much sense as the ancient cottages around it. As Craig says, ‘the older the barn gets, the more it will belong’. hutchdesign.co; @hutch.design
