School House Studio

The project focuses around the refurbishment of an existing workshop annex and surrounding gardens to the rear of a former school house in the village of Chadlington in the Cotswolds, West Oxfordshire.

The proposal creates a new artist’s studio with generous picture windows providing framed views out to newly-landscaped garden courtyards.

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Heinrich Tessenow self portrait, 1916

Existing materials such as Cotswold stone walls and slate tile roofs are retained and complemented with durable modern materials such as a polished concrete floor and large format modern glazing.

School House Studio

Project dates

2020 –

Type

Reuse

Status

Current

Gross internal area

27 m²

Construction cost

Private

Client

Private

Structural engineer

Davies Maguire

Selected projects

Notting Hill Garden House

Blackheath Garden Studio

Sevenoaks Visitors’ Centre

About

Nick Hill Architects is a design studio based in London founded in 2017.

Our interests span across scales and typologies: from objects to room interiors; individual buildings to the public spaces in between.

We are collaborative: we establish open conversations, drawing together contributions from clients, consultants, specialists and end-users to create thoughtful projects that are specific, appropriate and meaningful.

Our design is led by thinking about how people experience objects, buildings or places. Charles Eames said the role of a designer is like that of a thoughtful host who always anticipates the needs of their guests. We hold this to be true not just for the practical or everyday, but for the poetic, the delightful, or what Louis Kahn called the ‘unmeasurable’.

At a time of climate crisis and rapid demographic change, we find ourselves designing for a future that is increasingly uncertain. In response we are committed to finding ways of making and repairing that are both resilient and adaptable, with an economy of means as a central tenet in all projects, no matter the size or budget.

People

Nick has twenty five years’ experience working in architectural practices in the UK and in Hong Kong.

For more than ten years he was an Associate Director at David Chipperfield’s office in London, leading a series of high profile projects including two acclaimed new public galleries, the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire and Turner Contemporary in Margate, as well as the rebuild and refurbishment of Hotel Café Royal on Regent Street, and the realisation of a masterplan for the Royal Academy of Arts campus on Piccadilly.

From 2017 he worked as a consultant to Witherford Watson Mann Architects, drawing on his experience working with public galleries and historic buildings, he led their major refurbishment of The Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House until its completion in 2021. The project was recently shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2023.

Nick has been an invited critic and guest lecturer at architecture schools across the UK and in 2013 and 2014 was a guest lecturer at the Graduate School of Design in Harvard. He has served on competition juries and in 2013 was chair of the RIBA Awards jury for the East England region. He is currently an examiner for Part 3 professional studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Team past and present