Our brief was to create a home which can readily adapt without alteration to encompass a family gathering, or simultaneously retreat to become singular and introverted. Volumes and scale overlap so there are rooms within rooms, micro and macro spaces working simultaneously under an embodied roof.

Though it was never actually consecrated as a chapel, the unhallowed status became the protagonist for architectural intervention. The vocabulary of structural components; axis, narthex, fan vault, nave, and crossing were recast with similar dwelling archetypes: medieval hall houses, Victorian attic spaces, and long galleries to bring a unique dwelling type. Interior elements such as pulpit, confession, altar, pipe organ, and matroneum were interwoven with everyday forms of domestic furniture and situated around the activities of eating, sleeping, cooking, relaxing and study. Vertically, the spaces divide between day and night, heaven and earth.

Materials are ascetic in their quality so as to enrich and resonate with the emotional atmosphere. The external brickwork is constructed of bricks reclaimed from the existing chapel and the roof slate is reclaimed from locally demolished buildings. The inner volume is a pearly shell of waxed lime plaster and the floor is laid with extra wide lengths of bleached douglas fir, contrasting with the austere dark tones of the fumed oak joinery. All work was carried out by our in-house team of local craftsmen and London based sub-contractors.