The Makers Barn
The Makers Barn is a 70 square metre private retreat that HUTCH made from an abandoned piggery on London's rural fringe, a single storey under a pitched roof borrowed from the Tudor cottages nearby and clad in vertical larch. Craig Hutchinson, the studio's founder: "Rather than simply replicating the surrounding buildings we designed it as a contemporary reinterpretation of the local vernacular,". Inside are thick pinkish walls and ceilings of clay plaster, end-grain mosaic floors, local elm joinery, a concrete shower under a pocket of sky and a sunken bath with a brushed brass spout, and through the middle of the one room runs the element the studio describes as "a central concrete chimney, board-formed to take on the knots and grain patterns of wood", splitting the bedroom and study from the living, dining and kitchen end: "With openings at either side and at low and high level, the angled concrete chimney frames glimpses between the living and bedroom areas," as Hutchinson puts it.
The card is Helen Cathcart's photograph of that chimney from the living side, one frame of the post it was seen through, and the same face the studio photographs square on and wider on its own page: the pale concrete carries the grain of the boards it was cast against, a timber lined niche holds a black bottle vase, the wood stove sits in the opening at its foot with the firewood stacked beside it, an elm cabinet with open shelves of ceramics hangs on a pink plaster pier, a black three-legged stool stands on the shaggy rug over the end-grain floor, and the glazed door is open to the meadow and the fields beyond.
HUTCH
HUTCH is a British studio for architecture, interiors and curation, founded in 2017 by the architect Craig Hutchinson.
Design HUTCH (@hutch.design). Photography Helen Cathcart (@helencathcart). Styling Sarah Birks. Joinery Jacob Alexander. Seen via @siva.space.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.