One to watch: Ann Nisbet Studio keeps rural life at the centre of design

Ann Nisbet Studio has unintentionally been an all women practice since 2020. The studio is  recruiting another person to join Nisbet and the two others that work for her, so it may not stay that way for long. However, Nisbet says this situation has brought advantages. It means, for example, that the company has benefited from equally strong-minded women or women-led clients. Glendale, for example, is for a female client north-east of Glasgow. Also called Harmless House, the home has been designed especially to consider inclusive, accessible design suitable for ageing residents, and is dementia friendly as a part of its future proofing.

It is ‘a happy accident’, says Nisbet, that the practice is all women at the moment – but so (slightly) is the fact that the studio exists at all. Nisbet hadn’t planned to go solo. Age 34, she was contentedly principal architect at Dualchas’ Glasgow office, and had been there for around six years, when she was offered a commission to design a house in North Ayrshire, on the opposite side of Glasgow to Glendale. That house was Newhouse of Auchengee, a zinc and stained black timber-clad series of volumes around a three-sided courtyard. 

It was the second home to be built under a policy that allowed architecturally exceptional homes in rural locations in Scotland – then specific to North Ayrshire. She had persuaded the client to think beyond its initial ideas for a typical white-render and slate-tiled house and instead opt for a design that better reflected the context of the site, including the metal foundries in the area. The project won a RIBA National Award and was shortlisted for RIBA House of the Year 2017. It gained so much publicity that the practice rolled out of it and has now just passed its 10th anniversary.

Everything about the studio is undergoing an upgrade. It will move from its long-standing home on the top floor of a south Glasgow Pollockshields tenement into a nearby self-designed, converted shop this summer. Half the studio will be let to Nisbet’s partner who runs an illustration company. The practice is also expanding into new fields of work, including a 34-home scheme in north Glasgow. This is a joint project with Stallan Brand for Igloo. For the previous 10 years projects were all private houses, the overwhelming majority of them rural. Cuddymoss, one of Ann Nisbet Studio’s standout projects and the best known, was the first ever house to win the Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland last year.

There is a lot more going on in this portfolio of one-off beautiful homes. Perhaps the biggest clue is revealed when Nisbet looks back at the shock she felt on turning up as an undergraduate student at the architecture school at University of Strathclyde. She had grown up in a crofting community between Fort William and Mallaig on the west coast; her experience of architecture was that her parents had self-built their own home and she had spent time during her youth mucking about on building sites. But at Strathclyde, where she did Part 2 as well, everything they looked at was urban. Nisbet’s world of historic forms of building and close-knit types of community was barely recognised. It’s no surprise then that during her Part 1 year out she travelled to and worked in Toronto, and then after Part 2 went to Skye to work for Dualchas. She wanted to get closer to her roots – personal and architectural.

So much of what drives Nisbet is this challenge of rural/remote living. Her beautifully crafted houses are concerned with finding contemporary sustainable modes of living in rural areas. At an individual homes level, the studio’s approach is to respond to historic patterns of rural development and context. Cuddymoss, for example, retained a ruin on the site and inserted a structurally independent timber and steel shell within its walls. The idea was that future generations could potentially remove it and be left with what was there before. At a broader level the studio is interested in finding solutions to the housing crisis; Nisbet explains that this is particularly acute in rural areas because of land ownership models in Scotland, with insufficient land being made available for new housing, second homes and holiday homes. 

Nisbet’s quest, and one she is well positioned to tackle, is how to develop clusters of rural housing without falling back on urban precedents. By this, she means self-sustaining communities, collective ways of living and working, integrating live and workspaces since the Covid pandemic, caring for ageing communities and less car-dependent models.

One such scheme is in Applecross, also on the west coast, where 40% of houses are second homes. The client is a community company with a greenfield site at the heart of the peninsula area. The masterplan is a mix of houses, business units, co-housing and self-build sites and includes a shared hydropower scheme. As well as this the studio has just submitted planning for a five-house scheme in the Scottish Borders that will offer multi-generational living through five different approaches. Some add annexes, others integrate additional spaces within the home and some separate areas of the plan. There is another commission in the north-east of Scotland to redevelop a large farm site into housing, as well as a previous community feasibility study near Oban and the practice was shortlisted for an arts centre on Orkney via a RIAS competition. Ann Nisbet Studio is working all over Scotland.

However, the focus on rural context does resonate in urban situations too. Back in north Glasgow, the Dundashill project came out of a visual research initiative for Igloo on custom build. Nisbet describes selection of the practice as something of a wildcard. Here the practice drew on the local industrial heritage with its design of red brick topped by an upper-level pavilion made from corrugated metal cladding. The first completed terrace of 15 homes has only a few more to sell. Then there will be two more terraces, of 10 and nine townhouses each.

You could say that the studio’s rural focus has led to a slower start in practice. However, it is a circumstance that has consolidated the approach of Nisbet and her team, and a growing gateway to other forms of rural and urban work. Her work has already won many accolades, but in the practice’s transition to this next phase there is no doubt that there will be plenty of ideas and interest to look out for.