From most angles, this 18th-century barn in Norfolk, England doesn't look very modern, but a no-frills intervention from London's Lynch Architects turned it into a simple holiday home now available for short-term stays and outright purchase. Designers at Lynch refurbished the heritage-listed structure (along with an adjacent cottage), bringing in more light with a row of vertical windows.
The firm started by building a "new independent timber structure inside the old walls of the barn, insulating the ceiling and the floor, which enabled us to expose the old rubble walls internally," Patrick Lynch tells Dezeen. Walls were treated with a waterproof coating and every surface, sans the woods floors, was painted white in order to "emphasize the singular volume and to unify the space."
At one end of the combined living and dining room, a new partition wall was inserted to set off the master bedroom, and above it, up a "staircase traditional known as a Norfolk winder stair," a smaller bedroom lined with birch plywood. Lynch describes the whole as "designed very much with children in mind," with a focus on exaggerating "the playfulness of discovering a house on holiday, which is also why it has a slightly nautical theme."
—Alexa Carrasco
·Converted barn by Lynch Architects includes a traditional "Norfolk winder stair" [Dezeen]
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