Church House
Church House Church House is a minimalist home located in South Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, designed by Neil Dusheiko Architects. Few architectural commissions carry the weight of a Grade II* listed church directly across the road, and fewer still find a way to honor that presence without resorting to pastiche. Sited within a conservation area and oriented toward the medieval silhouette of All Saints Church, this project operates less as an extension than as a quiet negotiation between three structures: a historic house, its former coach house, and the parish church whose spire has anchored the village for centuries. The owners, both working in fashion and with three children settling into rural life after London, brought a sensibility shaped by proportion and material intelligence, informed in part by a childhood spent among English parish churches and the scholarly eye of an architectural historian father.
The scheme centers on a single-storey brick and glass extension to the rear of the main house, a move that preserves the formal front elevation while pivoting the domestic plan toward the churchyard view. This pivot is the project’s organizing idea. Rather than treating the church as a distant backdrop, the architects make it a constant spatial companion, framed through large-format glazing that draws light deep into the plan. The floor level drops subtly to meet the garden, resolving sightlines while maintaining privacy from the churchyard beyond. It is a deceptively simple gesture that reorients the entire household around a shared horizon.
Yellow Cambridge stock brick and flint roofing, both quarried from the regional vernacular, echo the church façade and the timber-framed coach house without mimicking either. Exposed rafters in the dining space borrow their measured rhythm from the structure of a church nave, translated into a domestic register through oak joinery, reclaimed brick, and brass fittings. The kitchen rejects the typology of the fitted galley entirely, with appliances concealed and cabinetry detailed as freestanding furniture, an approach that reads more as interior architecture than millwork. The clients’ fashion sensibilities surface here in the attention to seam, proportion, and tactile surface, closer to the logic of tailoring than conventional residential design.
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