“Oh my word! This immense cruciform building seems to have kept much of its real self. The timber roof is the original. The old relay switches now operate lights, and yet its architecture is all modern clarity and order”
Kevin McCloud
In the Spring 2025 series of Channel 4’s Grand Designs, Church Hill Barn was showcased as a quintessential example of adaptive reuse.
This feature highlighted the transformation of a 150-year-old barn into a contemporary home, serving as inspiration for a couple embarking on their own self-build journey Church Hill Barn has been filmed for the latest series of Channel 4’s Grand Designs.
Grand Designs, hosted by Kevin McCloud is perhaps the foremost home building television show.
The featured episode follows a young couple on their journey to convert a 150 year old barn and scheduled monument in Bedfordshire. Church HiIl Barn was chosen as an exemplary self-build project to inspire the Grand Design’s couple.
The programme is the second instalment of the Spring 2025 series of Grand Designs for Channel 4.
Church Hill Barn is featured from 17.51 minutes into the programme.
Watch the Grand Designs television episode.
Kevin discussed there history of Church Hill Barn with David.
Church Hill Barn was built as part of the model farm movement. The movement encouraged modern farming methods and the barn was built with the intention of undertaking multiple farming activities under a single roof, protected from the elements.
This is evident in both the build quality, the arrangement of the spaces within the building and the scale of the roof.
Situated on the Essex/Suffolk border, Church Hill Barn was originally part of the Assington Hall Estate, destroyed by fire in the 1950s.
The barn, designed in a cruciform layout, was constructed as part of the model farm movement to shelter various farming activities under one roof.
Preserving this agricultural heritage, the conversion aimed to maintain the barn’s scale and character while introducing contemporary living spaces
David’s design emphasised an open-plan layout to retain the barn’s expansive feel planned around the existing barn layout.
The aim being to keep the agricultural scale of the barn and prevent it from becoming overly domesticated.
Freestanding partitions crafted from birch-faced plywood serve as functional furniture, delineating spaces and providing privacy, without compromising the open volume.
The use of reclaimed materials, including Victorian slates salvaged from dilapidated structures on-site, honours the barn’s history.
Insulation was achieved using sheep’s wool, and the external walls were clad in larch timber, allowed to weather naturally.
Kevin admired the use of reclaimed materials, working with the features of the existing building and the awe inspiring scale of the spaces.
As part of the enabling works, two dilapidated farm buildings within the courtyard were demolished, thereby opening up the courtyard into a usable space and providing a large quantity of vintage bricks and slates for re-use within the barn.
The project has garnered several accolades, including:
Images : (Upper) Swinging chair in the barn, (Lower) Milking stalls (Photography, Steve Lancefield) / Kevin and David in the barn (Photography, DNA) / (Lower) Church Hill Barn timber structure detail (Photography, The Modern House). Swinging Chair by Ben Rousseau Studio.
