By the time you’ve got over the profligacy of the fact that this house sitting on a pond is in fact not a house in itself but a mere extension to a neighbouring manor house, you may have already forgiven the fact that the brick walls bookending it are not structural but a form of rain screen cladding. It’s the steel and timber structure within that’s doing all the work on architect Hamish and Lyons’ design. But that wasn’t going to create the contextual qualities the architect was craving; for this they looked to Michelmersh’s Charnwood I-line Hampshire Red brick, which had a ‘rich, uniform colour and extra length to emphasise the horizontal/ linear aspect of the building.’ This was helped by recessing the mortar joints ‘to highlight the materiality of each brick’. A neat, understated detail in a design that seems otherwise characterised by notions of excess.