FORCE OF NATURE

This East Lothian house is no longer at the mercy of the elements, thanks to an ingenious architectural rethink

- Malcolm Jack

A wind of change has blown through Kilberry House in rural East Lothian over the last six years.

It all began with homeowners Ben and Alison Walker nearly getting knocked off their feet by the howling gales that would whip across the long flat fields surrounding their cottage, and through the narrow gap between it and the adjacent hay barn.

“You'd get out of the car with your shopping,” Ben recalls, “and you couldn't even carry it to the back door some days. We'd get absolutely battered; it was like a wind tunnel. We wanted to create some sort of structure there, just to give us a windbreak, really. That was our starting point.”

Gareth Jones and Daryl Robbins, from award-winning architectural practice Jones Robbins Tobin, were brought in with a view to designing a series of garden rooms and sheltered terraces that would protect the house from the weather and allow Ben and Alison and their teenage daughter Ellie to start better enjoying Kilberry's abundant outdoor space and panoramic countryside views. These, after all, had been what had attracted them to the five-bedroom 1980s build in the first place, when they bought it back in 2019.

A glass link between the cottage and the barn, a few short metres away to the southeast, was devised as a new entry point to the home and an elegant solution to helping the family get their groceries in the door unruffled by the elements. It also served to pull the barn closer into the fabric of the main dwelling; from its upper floor, it has the best vistas southwards towards the Garleton hills through a newly added slim dormer window). The Walkers were so impressed with the architects' ideas that the project gradually developed into something bigger.