Stone Ridge Farmhouse

AThe brief

Six hundred tons of local limestone, walls twenty-six inches thick, and four generations of sensible additions, the most recent of which was a 1974 aluminium sunroom that leaked. The family had lived in it for eleven years and cooked in a room that got direct sun for about forty minutes in December. They wanted more space, and they were braced for us to tell them the answer was a large glass box, because that is what the last two architects had drawn. What they actually wanted was to stop being cold, and to stop apologising to guests for the kitchen.

BWhat we did

We took the sunroom off and did not replace it in kind. The new wing is a timber-framed volume set at fourteen degrees off the house's axis — the angle that squares it to true south rather than to the 1790s road — and connected by a low glazed link so the two never argue about which is more important. Because the wing is new construction, it carries the insulation, the airtightness, and the mechanicals for the whole property, letting the stone house stay a stone house: no interior furring, no vapour barrier fights, no lost window reveals. The kitchen moved into the wing. The old kitchen became the room where you sit when it is raining.

CThe decisions

1. ---

   01

   Fourteen degrees off

   The rotation is not a gesture. It puts the new glazing square to south, which gains roughly 22% on winter solar heat and, incidentally, hides the neighbour's pole barn from every seat in the room.

2. ---

   02

   The link does the arguing

   A four-foot glazed link, floor to ceiling, both sides. Old and new touch only there. It is also where every service crosses, so nothing was chased into eighteenth-century stone.

3. ---

   03

   Let the stone house be cold-ish

   We insulated the roof and the floor and left the walls alone. Thermally imperfect, historically intact, and the family reports the difference is imperceptible now that the wing carries the load.

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