Stairway to Heaven

Nithurst Farm, West Sussex The home of Adam and Jessica Richards. A striking new house designed by architect Adam Richards for himself and his family draws on remarkably eclectic sources, from Vanbrugh to Art House cinema. Jeremy Musson reports Photographs by Will Pryce.

- Jeremy Musson

HOUSES designed by architects for themselves and their families occupy a special place in the history of domestic architecture. They represent a particular canvas onto which an architect projects their ideas and personal dreams—Vanbrugh’s Goose-Pie House in Whitehall and his miniature castle at Greenwich are cases in point, or Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, west London. We may assume that such buildings are a full demonstration of their values, unrestrained by a client’s controlling hand: dream houses of a special and instructive kind.

Nithurst Farm, designed by Adam Richards and completed in February 2019, is, on one level, a beguilingly simple buff-brick structure sculpted into a deeply verdant setting between Blackdown and Petworth in West Sussex. At first, it seems almost an illusion, set down in a sloping, wedge-shaped field amid dense oak and beech woodland. On closer inspection, it reveals itself as a complex artistic endeavor, entirely contemporary and yet also subtly layered with forms that echo with ancient Rome, like a great gate or small fort; there is also a hint of a simple Tuscan villa. The architect himself cites the work of Vanbrugh—especially the hill-top castellar brick garden belvedere he designed from 1715 for the Duke of Newcastle’s house at Claremont House in Surrey (Fig 2).