Doug’s Yard

New build house and barn conversion on the outskirts of a Cambridgeshire village

The project, for a small property investment company is for the conversion and extension of an existing barn into a generous five bedroomed dwelling, and for a new dwelling between the barn and the road. The siting and volume of the new house is carefully composed to be in sympathy to the setting of the listed cottage to the north, and to present a generously glazed and formally composed façade to the south-facing garden.

View of house from the garden
Site plan proposed

We drew heavily on the work of the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens’ late arts & crafts houses with the loose arrangement of dormers on the low sweeping north roof slope and the formal south garden façade. Classical features such as the cornice moulding, window surrounds and doric cart lodges are in a tradition of modest houses which are aggrandised by such details.

The clunch walled barn has brick window dressings to the few new openings, a new pantiled roof and and a rebuilt brick extension in the volume of an existing tumbledown lean to. A double fireplace divides the large open living spaces.

The house is of whiteish Cambridgeshire stock bricks, clay pantiles and stone dressings, with a reinstated clunch wall to the street where such a wall stood until the 1960s. Planning permission granted for slightly altered scheme December 2013.

View from street
North elevation
View from paddock to side of barn, towards house