The site came with its argument already made. A drystone fold, roughly nine metres across, built to hold sheep off the westerly and doing it well enough after a hundred and forty years that the only sensible move was to agree with it.
So the house is the fold plus a roof over two of its sides. The existing wall is retained at its found height on the west and north, and the new work sits inside it, set off by four hundred millimetres so that you can walk the gap and see the join. That gap is the whole building in miniature: two things, from two centuries, not pretending to be one thing.
The room you cannot leave
The brief asked for a single space that could hold cooking, eating, reading and argument without partitions, and for that space to be impossible to walk past. It is placed at the elbow of the plan, so every route through the house passes through it. There is no corridor. Getting to the bedroom means crossing the room where somebody is reading, which the clients understood as a feature and their first architect had understood as a fault.
The floor is Caithness flagstone, and it continues out through the east opening into the courtyard without a threshold strip. The level is held; the stone does the rest. This is the detail that took the longest and the one nobody notices, which is the correct outcome.
Weathering
The harl was thrown in September, which is late, and the west elevation took nine months to settle to an even tone. It will keep moving. The Douglas fir above head height is unfinished and is already grey on the south-facing reveals and still brown inside the courtyard, and in five years that difference will read as a record of where the sun actually falls rather than as an inconsistency.
We did not photograph this house on handover day. There would have been nothing to see except our own work looking new.