Gabion: The lure of the one-off house. 1/6

By Hugh Pearman. A fuller version of the article published in The Sunday Times, June 9, 2002, as “So what should a house look like?”

In London’s modish Highgate, there is a place called the Barnhouse, which is one of the quirkiest and most pleasing new houses I’ve seen for some time. It feels as if it’s in the country. Meanwhile in Havringland, Norfolk, there are two interlinked houses known as Quaker Barns. These are right out in rural England, with chickens pecking around the doors, but inside you’d swear you were in Clerkenwell. Funny old business, domestic architecture.

Then there’s a house in one of Hampstead’s leafiest and most secret enclaves, where flat-roofed 1960s modernism is updated and extended with an eclectic mix of glass and steel, stone and wood. Another house uses brick: another, terracotta panels. One makes thick insulating walls out of straw bales, yet another, in Chelsea, is clad in veined red stone that looks like corned beef. These are among the crop of possible winners in this year’s RIBA awards to be announced this week - the annual trawl of the best British architecture which eventually leads to the Stirling Prize in the autumn.