Silver Bark House, County Down

RSUA (Northern Ireland) Award 2025
RSUA Sustainability Award

Silver Bark House, Hillsborough
Marshall McCann Architects for Four Seven Homes

Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 359m²

This remarkable house by Marshall McCann Architects manages to be both modest and ambitious. As a piece of architecture, it is modest in the way that it resists any grand gestures, any extravagant artifice. Instead, it concentrates its efforts on the careful making of a set of relaxed domestic spaces within a simple building envelope. 

Where it is ambitious is in the way it has reduced to an absolute minimum both its operational energy requirements and the embodied carbon resulting from its construction.

The house occupies a rural site overlooking the Mourne Mountains, some 15 miles southwest of Belfast. It is formed of two simple, two-storey volumes with pitched roofs, linked by a single-storey, flat-roofed element which creates an external porch and an internal hall. The two forms are set at an angle to each other, introducing a conscious informality into the site, and generating, in the space that lies between them, a sheltered courtyard garden.

Everything is made of timber – structure and cladding – and the unusually thick walls and roofs are insulated with cellulose, a recycled paper product. The house was designed to Passivhaus standards and achieves a high level of airtightness. 

The detailing throughout the construction is meticulously thought through, with great attention paid to the efficiency with which materials are used, to minimise waste. The timber-clad roof with its ingeniously concealed gutters has been particularly carefully considered. The setting out of the wall cladding subtly employs a variety of board widths to facilitate construction and enrich the surface.

This then is a modern house, not just in the way it looks but in the way it works. And this brings us to a further aspect of the ambition which underpinned its creation. For the house was not commissioned by those who now live in it, but was a speculative venture. 

The aim of its commercial developer was to prove that there would be a market for such a building, and indeed that there was now a new generation of householders who want to live responsibly in a highly sustainable home. An off-plan sale of the house showed that the developer was absolutely right.

See the rest of the RIBA RSUA Northern Ireland winners here. And all the RIBA Regional Awards here.

To see the whole RIBA Awards process visit architecture.com.

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