This glazed house-shaped gallery sits within an outdated barn in a English village with out appearing to touch the floor, the thick stone walls or the timber-truss roof .
Bath-primarily based studio Stonewood Design – which today won a RIBA Award with its layout for a garden cottage – was tasked with restoring a heritage-listed barn and house, and to create a gallery for the clients’ artwork collection.
The 17th-century buildings type component of an previous farm in West Littleton in the Cotswolds – a rural region of southern England recognized for its limestone homes and picturesque scenery.
Previous interventions were stripped away from the complex. This allowed the house to be extended into the barn, the place the architects have developed the new gallery.
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The pale oak and glass construction is intended to contrast the rugged stone walls and exposed wooden trusses that characterise the outdated barn – and which led to the building’s Grade-II heritage listing.
Named the Pod Gallery, the structure cantilevers from one side of the house without having touching the walls, roof or floor of the barn – a detail that contented conservation officers and helped the project gain arranging approval.
“It really is virtually as if the Pod Gallery was inserted as a node in between the two [structures],” said studio co-founder Matt Vaudin.
“The challenge genuinely was to have kind of wow minute the place you could go into the residence and then see this fantastic barn, which is church-like internally.”
“The pod is soft timber and warm, and it’s inside this cold stone barn that you can see from inside of it,” he added. “So there’s a genuine distinction amongst the real pod and the barn it’s inside.”
By steering clear of make contact with with the outdated construction, the architects wanted to give the new volume the impression of floating, as effectively as ensuring that the intervention could be reversible in the future.
“Quite a lot as a conservation method we did not want to pussyfoot around with the barn – like the saying putting lipstick on a gorilla – by plastering the barn and insulating it,” Vaudin advised Dezeen.
“It would not have received listed creating consent anyway, so that is where this notion of inserting a timber pod within the barn was truly strong.”
Current doors and windows in the barn were replaced with traditional arrow-slit openings and the exterior stonework was repointed in which needed.
Glazed windows in the gallery are aligned with these openings, and give views the two of the framework and out of it. The gable finish of the residence-shaped construction is glazed and faces into the dark barn.
The rest of the barn will both be utilized to exhibit bigger pieces of artwork – viewable from within the gallery – or as a space for the clients’ horse.
“They’re really keen not to mess with the barn – you never want to domesticate or neutralise it,” mentioned the architect.
“At the moment they’ve left it entirely as is so birds can fly into it,” he continued. “They are considering about whether to display larger pieces of artwork that you view from the Pod, or letting their horse inhabit that part of the barn.”
Photography is by Craig Auckland.
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