Abigail Hopkins and Amir Sanei are not only architects themselves, they are also the children of architects and grew up in houses built by their parents. So the idea of designing their own home had always seemed a natural thing to do. “For an architect, there is always the desire to build your own home, it’s so personal,” says Sanei. “You want to be able to shape how you live — but building a house is also a bit of a manifesto.”
Hopkins had lived in a refined steel and glass house that Patty and Michael Hopkins designed in north London in 1976 — and which is now a listed building. It led to her making her first conscious architectural decision. “The only partitions between our bedrooms were venetian blinds. When we were old enough, we insisted on proper walls,” she remembers. Her parents went on to build the office block Portcullis House for Members of Parliament; a stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground; Glyndebourne’s new opera house — and redesign the FT’s own HQ, Bracken House, among much else. Sanei’s father, who practised and taught architecture in Tehran, designed their house on the Caspian Sea.
Initially, Hopkins and Sanei assumed that building a new house for themselves on family-owned land overlooking the wide estuary of the River Alde, in Suffolk, in one of Britain’s protected areas of outstanding natural beauty, would be impossible. Their first idea had been to replace a derelict lodge on the estate that they had shared with Hopkins’s two siblings and parents for 15 years. When they started the process, it was suggested that an amendment written into planning law by John Gummer back in 1997 to cover new buildings in the countryside might offer a better alternative.
Gummer, now Lord Deben, was then the environment secretary in John Major’s last government. After addressing the imperative need to accommodate farm workers, the amendment adds: “an isolated new house in the countryside may also exceptionally be justified if it is clearly of the highest quality, is truly outstanding in terms of its architecture and landscape design, and would significantly enhance its immediate setting and wider surroundings”. It’s a high bar to clear, and one that is perhaps even harder to define. Convincing the local authority in Woodbridge that their design qualified took Hopkins and Sanei three years.
Gummer was trying to keep the tradition of the country house alive. He described it as “one of the great contributions of Britain to art and architecture”. It was a controversial idea at the time; one planning consultant even described it as “elitist”, suggesting it could be “a loophole for a millionaire”. The Conservatives were out of office before a single application using the new legislation could be considered. But it was adopted by their architect-friendly Labour successors, who presented it as a test bed for new thinking about building and planning rather than a nostalgic throwback.
New Lodge, as Hopkins and Sanei’s home is called, certainly looks nothing like the traditional idea of a stately home. Carefully sited on an estate created in the 19th century, it forms a distant satellite to a big house of the kind that Gummer would appreciate (though its neo-Georgian facades are a product of the 1950s, when the original Victorian house was heavily remodelled by Raymond Erith, perhaps Britain’s most accomplished 20th-century classicist). It is expressly designed to support the outdoor way of life, sailing and long walks that Hopkins and Sanei, their five children and an elegant pair of whippets had enjoyed when they lived in the annexe to the main house. Each family member has their own space, connected by an outdoor courtyard to an expansive double-height shared living area. “We had a special way of life here, and the new house allows us to go on living here the way we had done,” Hopkins explains.
“We were very aware of the passing of time and the generations. We wanted to ensure the house could continue to evolve as a multigenerational family home. This is not just a building for now, it’s a home for the future,” says Hopkins.
The guiding idea was to update the historic pattern of rural life anchored by big houses with networks of small working farms at a distance. Each farmstead typically had a farmhouse, a collection of barns, stable, cart shed and a granary clustered around a yard. Hopkins and Sanei used this as the starting point for what they call their “housestead”. It too is made of a group of distinct parts, but it is outward looking or “extrovert” rather than an “introverted” farmstead, as they put it, in order to take advantage of an exceptional setting.
Split into four wings, each uses an entirely different architectural language. “There were some members of the planning committee who were convinced that we were trying to pull a fast one and build four houses,” Sanei says.
The shared living space to the south has fully glazed walls, sheltered under a steep pitched roof, looking towards the river. It was thatched by David Rackham, the 14th generation of his family to work with reed cut from the local Dunwich and Walberswick reed beds. It was a painstaking process that took Rackham six months, working with just one assistant. Thatch makes for a roof with excellent insulating properties, and projects out over the fully glazed walls to shield them. In winter, the space is warmed by the sun; in summer, the walls open up for natural ventilation. The roof is supported on a structure reduced to a spider’s web of steel, painted a shade of Suffolk shocking pink.
There is more to Suffolk than picturesque villages and medieval church towers. It’s also a place of mysterious fragments of military archaeology such as the second world war coastal listening stations at Bawdsey and Orford Ness, the pill boxes and gun emplacements built to defend the area, and the new agricultural vernacular of corrugated iron. Traces of these local influences in New Lodge make it a kind of architectural collage.
The utilities and boilers are placed to the north in a hangar-like space under deftly cut corrugated steel, like a Savile Row version of a Nissen hut. Sleeping quarters for the five children are in the east wing. Each room has its own bathroom and study space, and is connected by a glass conservatory corridor for insulation. Hopkins and Sanei compare its unpainted chipboard finishes to the aesthetics of a habitable stable, potting sheds or greenhouses. But it’s more comfortable than that might sound. Photovoltaic cells and the solar hot water collector on the roof feed electricity back into the national grid.
Hopkins and Sanei have their bedroom and a studio in the west wing. The studio is a metal structure that Sanei confesses was inspired by a lunar lander. It sits on top of their brick bedroom, and is reached by a particularly elegant folded steel spiral staircase on the outside of the building. The steel was fabricated in Aldeburgh by another family-owned business started by Dennis Pegg’s great-grandfather, who was a blacksmith and farrier. Pegg specialises in precision engineering and was responsible for making the Aldeburgh “Scallop”: artist Maggi Hambling’s tribute to composer Benjamin Britten.
“I wouldn’t say that the children were treated as if they were the client,” Hopkins remembers; nevertheless, “there were drawings and models they could see, and they helped clear the site. We saw how they enjoyed their previous home here; [living in distinct areas] is second nature for them, we knew it would work. There was a discussion with our youngest about a tunnel from the studio to the bedrooms but, as late teenagers, they were delighted not to be too near to us.”
Asking an architect to do something outstanding and exceptional might be to invite them to lapse into pretension and self-consciousness. New Lodge is a much more thoughtful house than that. It is full of ideas about sustainability, design and planning that are applicable elsewhere, while at the same time being closely tailored to a particular place and a particular way of life.
Deyan Sudjic is director emeritus of the Design Museum in London
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