Conversion of post-war agricultural steel-framed barn into a four-bedroom house, adjoining a listed 16th century barn on an 8 acre site. The latter has been retained as a painting studio and gallery.

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The new house encloses two of the three bays that made up the asbestos-roofed agricultural barn which abutted the listed barn on the former’s south elevation. The first bay has been left as external space to create separation of old and new, also sunlight is able to penetrate the new house through the stripped, exposed and braced original steel roof members which continue internally.

 

The space created allows for the main entrance on the southwest side and a dining terrace on the southeast. The roof is now clad with insulated, profiled industrial aluminium sheeting. The exterior walls have been clad in a very broad section feathered edge unfinished larch board which is gradually silvering over time, toning in with the adjacent barn.

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The design utilises the height of the original steel framed barn, with double height internal space linking kitchen, living room, gallery and stairs. The house receives light from all directions, responding to the big skies of Norfolk and drawing the outside spaces into the house.

 

Views are open but controlled through careful placement of new walls; the interior offers selected fragments of the outside as well as a few broadsides. Generously sized sliding glazed doors on both sides of the house create a connection right through the house from the garden on the west, through the double height space, kitchen and across the garden on the east to the old cart sheds.

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In association with Jeremy Walker.

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Review, story and pictures in The Modern House:

https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/open-house-fred-laura-ingrams-barn-conversion-norfolk/

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