The Water Tower - a 1950s steel water tower converted into a home in rural Norfolk - and House on the Hill - an imaginative, contemporary extension to an 18th century farmhouse in Gloucestershire overlooking the Wye Valley - are the first two homes to be shortlisted for RIBA House of the Year 2021.
The annual award is presented to the best new architect-designed house or extension in the UK, with the shortlisted houses revealed on Grand Designs: House of the Year obver the next few weeks.
The RIBA House of the Year award was established in 2013 and is awarded to the best new house or house extension designed by an architect in the UK.
The challenge faced by Tonkin Liu to convert a disused historic Water Tower into accommodation has been handled effortlessly, completely avoiding pretentious reinterpretation or cliché. Standing tall within a setting of fields of Barley, the Water Tower, whilst extensively refurbished, has retained a strong and honest agricultural aesthetic.
In heritage terms, its status as one in a sequence of historic ruins within Castle Acre is not impacted, and in this particular case, the familiar unobstructed stilted silhouette figure.
Purchased for the equivalent value of scrap metal, a strong attitude towards reuse has been tirelessly pursued, with all materials already within the existing structure carefully reconfigured or relocated to formulate a new domestic programme, and with all necessary new materials hoisted carefully through the retained externalised braced structure.
A small eighteenth century farmhouse on an exceptionally beautiful site, the highest point of Gloucestershire, has been transformed, in a four-phase programme over ten years by Alison Brookes Architects into a very special place, both a home and a gallery of Indian and African sculpture. House on the Hill is a labour of love by client and architect working together with what appears to have been a complete unity of purpose.
An art collection might sometimes be a sobering influence on the liveability of a home, but here the overall mood is never didactic or pompous.
The house and its contents represent a near perfect amalgam of architecture, landscape, inhabitation and art that is notably poised and elegant as well as being light, fresh and airy. The overall mood is calm and entirely assured.
Previous winners include:
- McGonigle McGrath for House Lessans (2019)
- HaysomWardMiller for Lochside House (2018)
- Richard Murphy Architects for Murphy House (2016)
- Skene Catling de la Peña for Flint House (2015)
- Loyn & Co for Stormy Castle (2014)
- and Carl Turner Architects for Slip House (2013).
