Old School House, Pitcombe, Somerset

2024 RIBA South West & Wessex Award

Old School House, Pitcombe, Somerset
Bindloss Dawes Architects for Private Client
Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 135m²

The Old School House sits next to a church in an idyllic little valley near Bruton in Somerset. The rest of the village is some distance away so, apart from one other dwelling, the schoolhouse feels quite cut off from the world. It was converted to a house after the Second World War and was extended in an unsympathetic way in the 1970s. Bindloss Dawes Architects has replaced the old extension with a bigger timber-clad wing that mirrors the form of the schoolhouse, connected by a new galvanised steel framed, glazed sun room. The honey coloured, locally sourced chestnut cladding and the existing stone, quarried in nearby Hadspen, tone well together and careful judgement of proportion and scale mean the extension sits very comfortably alongside the historic building.

The extension is partially sunk into the ground so that two storeys could be fitted in without the eaves or ridge being higher than the schoolhouse. There are two bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs and a master bedroom suite upstairs. Above ground some effort has been made to limit its embodied carbon by using a timber frame. One of the clients is a colour curator for a paint manufacturer, so there are some inventive uses of colour, with subtle references to pieces of art or the tones in the landscape outside.

Cladding the roof as well as the walls gives it a certain monumentality. This is tempered by variations in the already greying timber and the narrow width of the boards being similar to the lines of tiles on the schoolhouse. A large window on the gable end refers to a similarly placed opening on the schoolhouse gable, while four smaller openings on the south flank have a more intimate scale. The pattern change on the external cladding splits the upper and lower floor visually and emphasises the more intimate scale of the sunken lower floor. At ground-floor level the timber cladding is fixed horizontally, with protruding boards that cast strong shadows. Above first floor and on the roof the boards are vertical with gaps in between, a finer version of the open ‘Yorkshire boarding’ found on some agricultural sheds.

To be in keeping with a historic building, a new extension is usually expected to be subservient. This addition is instead quietly equal in scale, and succeeds due to the level of care and judgement in the massing and detailing that allows it to sit proudly but modestly alongside.

See the rest of the RIBA South West and Wessex winners here. And all the RIBA Regional Awards here.

To see the whole RIBA Awards process visit architecture.com.

RIBA Regional Awards 2024 sponsored by EH Smith and Autodesk