Alde Valley Barn is a new holiday house built within a farmyard complex near Aldeburgh in Suffolk.  The original farmhouse dates from the 17th Century, although the timber frame was replaced externally with a new brick façade in the early 19th century. The new house replaces a 20th century agricultural steel-framed barn and forms a courtyard alongside an original brick and flint faced barn and cart lodge.  The Barn is an amalgam of the original farmhouse and the steel barn; a simple form, timber framed and clad in brick.

The Barn is designed for groups of friends or family for social occasions, rather than for general family living.  It has four bedrooms downstairs, with the upstairs open to the exposed timber framing of the shallow pitched roof.  The upstairs is designed to be one big space, separated into areas for socialising: the east terrace overlooking the pond, the west terrace of the main living space, and a snug.  Picture windows make the most of far distant views over the Suffolk rolling fields of the Alde Valley. A stair and lift connect the two floors, making the house fully accessible.

Materials are deliberately subtle; on first glance the house is simply a part of the group of brick farm buildings; a two-storey sliding corrugated black metal door reinforces this feeling. At each end the recessed black cladding and projecting steelwork hint at a different kind of building, which is only fully appreciated once inside and under the roof, looking out. 

The barn is designed as a sustainable low-energy house, with an EPC rating A.  Embodied energy is reduced by the timber frame structure and the use of wood fibre insulation. The energy is supplied with an ASHP, and generated by rooftop photovoltaic panels. A Mechanical Ventilation and Heat Recovery (MVHR) unit allows good ventilation without heat loss.  Air permeability was measured at 1.98 m3/hr m2 and the predicted energy use is calculated as 4,300 kWhr/yr, about half of which is calculated to be supplied by photovoltaic panels on the roof.