Project overview
Hartdene Barns sits within 40 acres of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on the Kent-Sussex border, on the site of a cluster of farm buildings that once stood; nine new homes now occupy those same footprints.
Nissen Richards Studio inherited an earlier planning permission requiring the new homes to follow the original building footprints. Rather than treat this as a restriction, the practice used it as a starting point. The varied roof profiles, curved and pitched in forms recalling Dutch barns, dairies and hay stores, give the nine houses a coherent ensemble quality without tipping into pastiche. Together, they establish a grouping that reads as settled within its landscape, each building distinct but clearly part of the same family.
The homes range from three to six bedrooms, each with its own garden and allotment. One incorporates a pond formed from a wartime bomb crater. Landscaping across the site uses native planting to support local wildlife, reinforcing the connection between the development and its surroundings.
Freshfield Lane First Quality bricks were chosen alongside charred spruce cladding and black standing-seam zinc roofing. The depth of tone places the buildings within the wooded landscape without straining for effect. Against the darkness of the cladding and roofline, the brickwork provides warmth and material weight, stopping the elevations from reading as uniformly cold or industrial. Cladding patterns vary across the facades to articulate entrances and reduce the apparent scale of the larger buildings. The brickwork holds steady beneath, providing a consistent base for the rest of the composition. Generous windows frame long views across fields and forest, while smaller openings face shared spaces between homes to maintain privacy.
The revised plans were resubmitted to amend the original permission, with Nissen Richards Studio demonstrating how the footprints of the former farm could accommodate a genuinely contemporary approach without compromising the character of the AONB.
