It was only after living in their 400-year-old Jacobean farmhouse in Suffolk for 3 years that Architect Howard Nash (Co-director of Nash Baker Architects) and his partner Monique Beauval-Nash felt they knew the building well enough to make a start on its renovation. They used this long gestation period to good effect, repairing and improving decaying Victorian farm outbuildings and developing creative ways of tackling the architectural and conservation issues raised by the main farmhouse.
Now, they have completed building works to the farmhouse and the result is a subtle and exquisite weaving together of the historic, the not-quite-so historic and the contemporary into a quietly confident statement of architectural and design excellence.
Opening-up of the building revealed more serious timber decay than expected. Two-thirds of the 400-year-old wall plates at eaves level had been turned to dust by death watch beetle. And much else. Floor beams and joists at first floor level had been seriously affected by wet rot. It was discovered that the floor voids were filled with soil. Added to which was evidence of a section of floor having been cut away to accommodate machinery, suggesting that at some point in its history this floor of building had been used for the storage of root vegetables.
The programme of structural repairs was expanded to meet these challenges and the house ceased to be inhabitable. The owners moved out and went to live next door in the ‘Cowshed’, a habitable studio they had created from an L-shaped Victorian farm building previously converted by the Squire from open-sided cattle accommodation into his garage and motor workshop.
As structural works progressed, a deeper understanding of the building was also developed. This resulted in various refinements being made to the scheme, including a significant rethink of the ground floor layout and the architectural design of the new extension. It was considered more appropriate historically and functionally to continue using the Victorian scullery for service functions, such as laundry, heating plant, boot room, back hall and cloakroom, rather than relocate them into the old kitchen in the main part of the house.
This enabled the architectural design of the new family kitchen extension to be simplified, becoming a 3-bay single storey lean-to element, not dissimilar from a traditional orangery. A full height glazed screen wall is set at the back of a shallow loggia formed by a line of brick piers and flat voussoir arches built of Bulmer handmade bricks in hydraulic lime mortar. Sand was carefully selected for its low iron content, its grittiness and its pale colour.
Key products
A hierarchy of different floor finishes was selected. Natural York stone was lifted and re-laid in the Victorian Scullery and Porch. For the new family kitchen-dining space, Gris de Catalan, a dark honed limestone with embedded fossils was selected. On the rest of the ground floor and for the whole of the first floor, a wide engineered oak floor board was used.
Lime plaster was used throughout for new work and for making good. All plasterwork was decorated with lime based paints supplied in a neutral grey tint by Francesca’s Paints.
Building methods
Investigations on site then revealed extensive damage from death watch beetle in the original wallplates. It became increasingly clear that extensive carpentry repairs and reconstruction would be required, the more so if the roof were to adequately support the increased load from removing the profiled concrete roof tiles and replacing them with reclaimed clay plain tiles instead.
An experienced master carpenter, a wood framer with an international reputation, Axel Weller, was called in to undertake the oak work with engineering support from the Morton Partnership. Axel, who was trained in East Germany, and worked with temple builders in Nepal and Japan, is a devotee of traditional manual carpentry using green oak obtained by ‘lunar phase’ felling.
A suitable 150-year-old oak tree was located on an estate in Norfolk. Its trunk rose straight upward for 12 metres without a branch. It was purchased as a standing tree from the landowner, a price of £500 being agreed by reference to the Hopper’s foot calculation, an ancient method of estimating the cube of usable timber the tree will yield. The oak was then felled there and then, it being March and a day coinciding with New Moon, when sap is rising but at a slower rate. The tree was felled and left on the ground for 3 months, complete with its head so that the emerging foliage would continue to draw out sap, reduce the moisture content and ready the oak for conversion into sections for building in. Axel was confident that there would be minimal shrinkage in green oak obtained by these means; and so it has proved.
The roof repairs and reconstruction took several months to complete but have reinstated and revealed its historic carpentry. Combined with the removal of modern partitioning, false ceilings and eaves infills, the re-planned attic suite is once more as architecturally legible and spacious in feel as it would originally have been.
