War and peace: Story of Emily Museum

When Oliver Sadler of Stonewood Design told me that one of the buildings at the tweely named Story of Emily Museum had to be very inward looking, and quite different from the Cornish stone walls of the rest of the buildings, I didn’t quite get it. Though I know exhibition designers who use audio visuals like to have dark spaces to work with, having now been through the museum’s War Rooms, it becomes clear. This is a vessel for a powerful exhibition for anyone in ignorance of the Boer Wars, the appalling scorched earth policy of Lord Kitchener, and the ensuing treatment of Boer and black people, who were put into nearly 200 British-run concentration camps on minimum rations with impossibly poor water supplies.

The museum tells it in a just-about palatable way by concentrating on the life story of campaigner Emily Hobhouse, who worked to draw the British public’s attention to conditions in the camps. Hobhouse grew up in the mid-19th century rectory – now grade II* listed – in the small village of St Ive, which is the other section of this museum. The architecture conspires with this museum structure. The War Rooms are tucked away at the back of the site, leaving the museum complex to revel in a feeling of countryside bonhomie, reusing farm buildings to create a lofty entrance hall, flanked by the stone form of the café with a dramatic modern conservatory facing onto a walled garden. 

Sitting in a dell, slightly sheltered from the wind and looking out through the courtyard to the stately Turkey oak, with the parish church on your shoulder, this is a set of resolved designs that tell you all is well with the world. Hobhouse’s life, up to the age of 34 is told through the house, thoroughly remastered by Le Page Architects, with a tinkling bell and shelves of linen and candles to set off rooms of dinner sets and intense Victorian wallpaper. 

Anyone who knows The Newt in Somerset, whose South African owner and founder was also behind this project, will recognise some of the tropes. This museum shares an emphasis on landscape and planting with a boardwalk from the flower-edged car park into the site and an 8m-high viewing mound catching the views, and the wind, from the land around Liskeard. These are not the only links though. The Newt was, in fact, the family seat of the Hobhouse family and RIBA Journal has previously published the garden museum and tree top walk and the Roman villa and museum there – all by Stonewood Design. 

The slim courses of slate stone from local Yennadon and Lantoom quarries have a rusted warmth to them. They run throughout the site, sometimes varying in their dimensions and orientation: the staff houses, replacing 70s buildings, are in stone; the historic Cornish hedges are made of upturned stone planted with native hedging; while inside the restaurant they are laid as if drystone walls. The entry building has had its stone repaired and repointed with lime mortar, with extra layers of insulation giving a solid depth to the walls. Subservient volumes are clad in timber; the gardeners’ store and the entrance security building sit back quietly – although the latter is also important as it houses the semicircular volume where an orientation film plays.

The apparently frameless windows offer some hints as to the three most dramatic moments of these buildings, where glass appears apparently quite independent of steel or other structures, courtesy of work with engineer Tim Macfarlane of Glass. From the barn-like calm of the entry building we are presented with glimpses of the rather mysterious War Rooms through the glass portal. Here the building is already becoming exhibition with the deconstructed arch looking like it has taken an explosive charge (stones are held in place by steel rods and glue).

The second of the glass moments comes in the enclosed world of the War Rooms. A series of tiny dark rooms where you are introduced to characters opens up into a bright stoop (verandah) looking out onto a stretching veld. Here the glass is doing a lot of the exhibition’s heavy lifting. Seven panels make up a 21m-long rooflight, under which fig trees are growing. This is pre‑cambered glass, designed with a carefully calculated angle so that it would settle flat, thus allowing more slender glass.

But the glass pièce de résistance adds its own piece of theatre to the South African eating experience in the café. Here a 20 x 3m structural wall of glass (six layers in total) connects diners north towards the productive walled garden, the Victorian-style greenhouse and the nearby church where Hobhouse’s father was a clergyman. It is hard to tell if the absence of silicone joints or columns really makes a difference to the eating experience but it does somehow symbolise a luxurious generosity that tourists of the Grand Designs generation will easily relate to their coastal holiday homes. With an open kitchen and this large conservatory-restaurant, Stonewood has put some effort into avoiding overheating with solar control and photovoltaic-powered mechanical cooling for peaks.

There are other elements to the restaurant. The engineered timber floor lining the soffit above the open kitchen, the scalloped yellowwood from South Africa and the more contained room that can be turned into an independent space for school groups or private dining or just a quieter space at a busy time. But in fact it is the delicious reinterpretation of historic South African dishes and the energetic enthusiasm of the team that really make it – the latter all part of a well thought through visitor strategy of staff sharing their passions.

There is a whole gentle visitor experience available here without ever visiting the War Rooms. In fact that building has been designed to cut you off from the Cornishness of the rest of the museum. It is a little threatening in the change of scale. I read the colour of the scalloped zinc cladding as the colour of a sun-bleached military uniform and the peeling off of the facade into an entrance as drawing on the angles Libeskind talks of as ‘shard’ at his Imperial War Museum North. Inside is a staged, immersive experience designed by Kossmann.dejong.

To get the most from it you have to submit to the changing of shoes and moving from room to room strictly in time with the audio-visual cues. You can get quite lost in the deeply troubling story and lose any sense of the plan, which turns you around inside the War Rooms, now on a baked mud floor, now in a rocky gorge ringing with the sound of guns, now into miles of concentration camp, summoned up by mirrors. 

There are artefacts, rifles, children’s clothes and the echoing words of Hobhouse reporting on the horrors. It seems almost ridiculous after this experience to talk about the gold reception desk – gold was after all the wealth the British empire was after – and how the gold wallpaper covering was given longevity by the layers of resin applied by a local surfer. 

It is likely the museum will be at its busiest on rainy days as holidaymakers seek shelter, just as they do at the nearby Eden Project. And at a time when most galleries, museums and attractions are reporting dramatic drops in visitor numbers, it has to be hoped that the architecture and the power of this story, that has long remained untold in Britain, will be enough to bring a steady stream of visitors.

In numbers 

Total contract cost Confidential
War Rooms 1,880m² 
Blackthorn Grange and Introduction Building 203m²
Café 340m²
Outbuildings 98m² 
Chantry 530m² 
Staff accommodation and facilities 300m²