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" How the design developed" - Damien Blower, Planning Architect

‘Too often, barn conversions look the same in many parts of the country. There seems to be a prevailing ‘style’ that everyone sticks to, but this fails to reflect the diversity of rural landscapes and cultures in which barns thrived. Traditionally barns, and their relationships to the farms to which they were attached, have always been about responding to local conditions and materials. New ideas have been stifled in the belief that this prevailing orthodoxy is the only way to carry out a successful conversion. Here, an entirely different approach is proposed; one which strips the existing building back to its essential elements and splices in an architecture that is at once vital, lyrical and honest.

In the ‘Threshing Barn’ no attempt has been made to pastiche an imaginary rural house or lifestyle, but to honestly reflect the desires of the client and the needs of the building; a desire for an open contemporary living-space suffused with light, views and access to outside; a need for an existing building to remain unconstrained in its simple vernacular architecture and singularly impressive in the wider setting.

Because of its size, a great deal of space can be carved out of the volume without even beginning to fill it. The interior design is predicated on the shere drama of the existing barn contrasted with the inserted volumes sculpted out of it. The design deliberately sets a dialogue between the new organic and fluid interior structures placed in the barn against the rational and orthogonal timber structure; the ‘soft’ versus the ‘hard’ – ‘smooth’ versus ‘rough’. These new sculpted forms contain the private spaces – the bedrooms – which cocoon-like, are suspended in the massive volume of the barn. All the support spaces are discretely tucked away, so that the entire space is almost totally open-plan.

The existing elevations are respected in a subtle way and the only significant intervention into the buildings, are the windows and doors. The main cart entrances are fully-glazed in painted thin-section steel-framed full-height windows, which reinforces the traditional architecture of such barns. The remaining windows relate to the internal spaces and the lyrical play of sunlight over the internal spaces. The rhythmic use of small, large, narrow, wide, short and tall windows are entirely contemporary but respond to a long tradition of the ‘organic’ in architecture.

Barn walls have traditionally been punctuated by openings in a seemingly haphazard way, reflecting changes over time and relating to heterogeneous internal uses. The inside of a barn is a variegated experience, with sunlight shining between cracks, shafts and air vents; the outside honestly reflecting the inside and the demands of the user of the building. No farmer ever thought the aesthetic of a farm building ruined by a new window or extension – buildings grew and were adapted organically to suit changing needs. This architecture of the vernacular is infused within a particularly British architectural tradition; the Arts & Crafts borrowed forms of architecture from such vernacular buildings. This tradition did not suddenly cease, and its dark recesses, can be seen continuously in modern architecture. In an era where style has fewer political, social or cultural implications, the vernacular/organic tradition can thrive in a contemporary architecture.’ Damien Blower, architect. February 2002, Farnham.

Stedman Blower additional background

Stedman Blower are a leading design-focused architectural practice based in a converted barn near Farnham in Surrey. They have been awarded and cited for excellence in residential and conservation work by the Times Newspaper, Country Life, Surrey CC, Civic Trust and the Royal Institutes of British Architects (RIBA) and Chartered Surveyors (RICS). Their work, widely published, continues to explore themes expressed in the ‘Threshing Barn’; the use of traditional materials in contemporary ways; the sculpting of internal space and volumes; the building in and as landscape.
Damien Blower, design director and principal, trained in London and Los Angeles, where he worked for Frank Gehry, before taking over the family practice of Stedman & Blower, first founded in 1895.