Hillcott Barn looked more like a Tuscan monastery than an English barn. When the farmer put it up for sale, most people who viewed it walked away. It was dark and isolated and could only be reached by a half mile farm track with a steep gradient.
But furniture designer Robert Ellis had had his eye on it for some time. For years he'd been jogging past the barn and always thought one day he'd like to live there. Against all advice, Rob and his wife Jane, a textile designer, went ahead and bought the barn for £210,000 and proposed to convert at £250,000.
The couple had radical ideas for their new home. The barn was so dark all their plans were designed to get as much light into the space as possible. By adding a new slate roof and building a narrow window all the way around the top of the building between the walls, thin shafts of light filter into the building mirroring the slashes of light created by the old slit windows.
Inside Robert and Jane have treated the building as one giant canvas on which to unleash their creativity. They've created two large open plan galleries, one on the ground floor and one on the first floor. There are very few internal walls so that light can flood through the spaces. On the ground floor is a kitchen, a snug study and two bedrooms. The walls of the old barn aren't strong enough to take a new floor so Jane and Robert have constructed a freestanding steel frame to support the first floor. The main living room is in the middle of the barn at first floor level to make the most of the stunning views.
The large threshing doors on either side of the barn have been replaced with two huge full height glass doors which pivot at the centre so that the barn can be opened up completely to the elements. Downstairs, a polished concrete floor extends outwards through the large glass doors on either side of the building so that the whole structure looks like a cross from the air.
The conversion cost much more than the estimated £250,000, running to in excess of £400,000.
Project manager, Jane, breaks down the significant overspend into four general areas. Firstly the utilities cost a lot more to bring to site than they were expecting. Secondly she feels they didn't get value out of the first contractor. Thirdly, Jane believes the roof was over engineered and that the cost of it escalated because the roof would not support the huge weight that was put in to it by the architect. And finally the overspend can also be put down to 'general specification issues'.
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