The project reaches across the house and wider estate, restoring significant interiors while reordering spaces that no longer serve the way the house is lived in today.

New architecture strengthens its relationship with the gardens, while the landscape, outbuildings and infrastructure are considered together as part of the estate’s long-term future.

Successive alterations have left some rooms remarkably intact while others have become fragmented or disconnected. Our proposals work selectively through these different conditions: lost details are reinstated, surviving fabric repaired and inappropriate later interventions removed, while earlier proportions and relationships are recovered where the evidence allows.

Elsewhere, more substantial change is needed. Circulation is carefully reordered around the way the house is to be lived in, family rooms are brought into a closer relationship with one another and new openings importantly reconnect the interior with the gardens.

Behind this, services and environmental performance are being comprehensively upgraded, including a water-source heat pump connected to the estate’s existing natural pond, which is being restored, relined and reshaped as part of the wider landscape works — allowing an established feature of the grounds to play a new role in the future of the house.

Barnham Court has endured through occupation, adaptation and care. Our work continues that tradition: repairing what has survived, recovering what has been obscured and introducing new architecture where it can give the house renewed purpose.

The intention is not to return Barnham Court to a particular moment in its past, but to allow an exceptional historic house to continue evolving without losing the qualities that made it exceptional in the first place.