Hastings House, Hastings

The eccentric late 19th-century Hastings House perches on a west-facing slope just above the town centre, sandwiched between the street and a secondary rear access road. Hugh Strange Architects embraced the awkward three-storey level change across the site to turn an otherwise mundane domestic refurbishment project into a game of concrete structural repair and new interlocking timber-framed rooms. 

The detached house is barely altered and beautifully refurbished, retaining fine mouldings, stained glass, fretted barge boards and decorative hung clay tiles. At ground-floor level, however, the openings in its rear wall – which previously accessed a gloomy full-width lean-to extension – are adjusted, with no loss of solidity, to form a threshold into a new world of cellular spaces that ascend the rear terraced garden. 

Wide timber-framed sliding glass doors, which enclose the new rooms, open onto a repaired but still rough concrete yard that has the promise of becoming the most important room in the house. A galvanised steel staircase skirts the patched retaining wall to its rear, to reach a shelf-like pathway where a cherry laurel clings to its edge, and unpretentious concrete blockwork walls form planted beds. A pergola of bolted galvanised steel sections tops off the pile of architecture at the upper road level. 

The complex articulation of the new structures, with their finely detailed joinery (both fabric and fitted) set against the found vertical garden of roughly cast concrete and basic blockwork, strikes a very poetic chord. It is both charming and intriguing, and clearly very liveable – despite the perhaps disconcerting absence of furniture in the plans and photographs.