Housestead, Suffolk

2025 RIBA East Award

House
Sanei + Hopkins Architects for private client
Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 510m²

This fun and eclectic weekend home is for its architects, Amir Sanei and Abigail Hopkins, and their children to use. Set on a breathtakingly beautiful piece of land overlooking a coastal inlet near Aldeburgh, it is part of a larger estate.

Their design consists of an experimental, joyful set of distinct building elements. The glass-walled living room has a massive thatched roof supported by lightweight pink steel columns and trusses. 

The children’s bedrooms form a single-storey block, with improvised solar water-heating panels as the roof, and a glazed south-facing corridor featuring a Trombe wall, which is designed to absorb solar heat and then release it back into the space. 

A curved-roofed, steel-sheet barn contains the services, and offers a sublime updating of a wartime Nissen hut. Most strikingly of all, a brick base contains the main bedroom, yet above it, atop a pylon structure, sits a 360-degree glazed office that feels as if it is a viewing tower for gazing at the river estuary beyond.

A key reason for this decision to split up the different parts of the home was practical. If the couple are spending the weekend by themselves, then they only need to use their bedroom/office block and the thatched living space. However, if their children are there as well, then the bedroom block comes into play. 

In this sense, the dispersed layout of Housestead also responds to how its occupants inhabit it. It clearly facilitates a form of family life that is to be lived outside whenever possible, with the house itself serving as a supporting shelter in the Suffolk landscape, yet not in any sense hidden away. These totally unexpected juxtapositions between the built elements create a quirky and deeply inventive design that has something of 1980s postmodernism’s playfulness about it – if one happens to enjoy different aesthetics and materials, then why not include all of them? 

However, it also exhibits a remarkable amount of architectural expertise in doing so. The pioneering postmodernist architect Robert Venturi once coined the term ‘both-and’ as an alternative to the need for architects to choose ‘either-or’. This scheme can best be described as ‘both-and-and’. 

View all of our East winners here, and all our RIBA UK Award winners here.

View the full RIBA UK Awards 2025 process.

RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX