Knepp Wilding Kitchen and Shop, Horsham

Knepp describes itself, on its website, as ‘a 3,500-acre rewilding project that has changed the way we think about nature and how we can heal our planet’. 

The Knepp Wilding Kitchen and Shop has been born out of a collection of decaying and underused farmyard buildings to offer the missing piece in the Knepp experience. It provides visitors with an opportunity to refuel and reflect on their visit, enjoying the farm produce (both animal and vegetable) and supporting the Knepp project. 

Kaner Olette Architects carved the new venue out of buildings and yards, with selective demolition and retention, to create a car park, shop/entrance, courtyard/garden and restaurant/café supported by service access and storage. The courtyard is currently bounded by buildings on three sides, with a potential fourth building under consideration for the courtyard’s west side; this would become an important final piece, providing a venue for talks, exhibitions and interpretation, currently loosely accommodated within the shop. 

In the spirit of Knepp, the place that has been made from the carefully crafted conversions and extensions is neither overly refined nor entirely ‘complete’, retaining a sense of potential and a relaxed feeling that time will tell. Its incremental quality will happily accommodate future opportunity: the numerous nesting boxes and roosting features may or may not be occupied! 

The impressive but unlisted 18th-century timber-framed Sussex barn has been repaired with good traditional techniques. The architectural interventions here are limited to a reinstated entrance bay, polished concrete floor, salvaged glazed screens and woven oak partitions. 

A contemporary extension ‘shed’ clad in red-oxide steel sheeting sits comfortably alongside the vast red-clay-tiled roof of the barn. Internally the long bar supported on rammed earth, and a striated plaster end wall, both refer to the importance of the soils at the heart of Knepp. The barn and extension open onto the loosely organised courtyard, with decaying red-brick paths breaking up loose gravel seating areas. 

The retention of an unexceptional cow shed for conversion into the shop is interesting. Analysis of the embodied carbon of a replacement building of steel or glulam, which would meet required performance requirements, made it clear that the better course was to retain, strengthen and upgrade the existing. 

Its workaday characteristics are a perfect fit. Reinforced and re-clad in Douglas fir sourced from the estate, with a new corrugated roof over wood-fibre insulation, the shed’s profile is extruded by an extension clad in CorTen weathering steel. This provides a visually compelling main entrance from the car park, with flexibility for adaptation as the needs of the estate’s visitors evolve. 

Visitors to the Wilding Kitchen and Shop are treated to delicious local produce in a setting that speaks clearly of the ethos and values of the place, seemingly effortlessly preserving the Knepp character as a regenerative enterprise.