Wool Hall, a Grade two listed landmark in a Somerset village, is reimagined as a family home with a private recording studio while honouring its layered past. Once an outlet for craft, residencies and musical production, it attracted artists escaping city life. That cultural legacy remains central, treating the building as a living archive and translating its eclectic history into a contemporary domestic setting without diluting the character that made the hall an enduring creative retreat.
The sixteenth-century hall is carefully restored and reorganised around a dramatic new sequence. A sculptural stair traces the principal elevation, framing an arched glazed partition that signals the shift from heritage shell to renewed interior. On arrival, a multi-level atrium pulls sightlines vertically, while views connect left to the domestic wing in a crimson timber-clad extension and right to an open-plan kitchen and living area retained within the original hall.
Material and environmental gestures stitch old and new. Terrazzo flooring traces where historic partitions once stood, preserving memory in the plan. The late twentieth-century rear addition is remodelled as a contemporary counterpart that speaks in an
alternative voice to the original hall. Courtyards are carved into the layout to enable natural cross-ventilation and to renew connections to the rural setting, allowing the home to breathe and sit more lightly within its landscape.
Judges consistently hailed the project as exemplary, praising sensitive refurbishment, confident interventions and the assured, characterful outcome. They highlighted refined detailing, richly tactile materiality and a cohesive palette with a warm yet disciplined tone, noting an elegant, subtly industrial quality. The transformation was credited with clarity of vision, inventive spatial connections and a strong sense of place, with multiple judges describing it as category-leading and a worthy overall winner. One judge remarked: “A masterful adaptive reuse of a Grade II listed hall, blending rich musical heritage with bold, sensitive design to create a characterful, contemporary home and recording studio.”
