RIBA Stirling Prize 2013

At Astley Castle, we started with a ruin. In places it seemed no more than a pile of stones, in others it was a ruin in the grand tradition. After eight centuries of continuous habitation, a fire had burned off its roofs, and three decades of freeze-thaw humbled its walls. Time the destroyer was a good architect, bringing light and creating long views out.

We haven’t restored it, nor left it as a broken, romantic relic. We re-established a kind of wholeness, making it stable, binding it together; but we retained a feeling of incompleteness, leaving it porous, its wounds still open.

The house is inside-out: ruin had already blurred its boundaries. We pieced in new walls, lintels and roofs to buttress and tie the remnants, and re-established its cellular logic. The fifteenth and seventeenth century rooms are left as open courts, rooms with ‘a fresco of clouds on their ceiling’.

The house is also upside-down. By partitioning the ground floor we fit four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The first floor - with its grand renaissance windows and savage gashes - is a large hall, with living, dining and kitchen areas. We kept the large gashes, and glazed them. The church is the fourth wall of the living area, while the courts open up beside the dining table.

We piece in with brick, precast concrete and laminated timber: their colour engages with the red sandstone and green limestone; their strength is partly concealed. Everything steps, because nothing we connect to has a straight edge, and nothing aligns; and because this allows thin modern construction and thick ancient construction a kind of equality.

With the inner core sitting within a perforated outer shell, the house is like a sundial, the sun tracing the day across its floors and walls. It breathes with the seasons, its covered courts inviting the guests to expand into the warm summer air or retreat to the stove in winter. It’s a festive house, where guests live an experience of collective time – conversations across generations and distances are framed by the centuries and the hours.

This sensitive scheme places the new building at the heart of the old, demonstrating creativity, preservation and conservation.
In a 12th century fortified manor, further damaged by fire in 1978, the architects have created a new house that allows Landmark Trust guests to experience life in a near thousand-year-old castle with distinctly 21st century mod cons.
Astley Castle demonstrates that working within sensitive historic contexts requires far more than the specialist skills of the conservation architect: this is an important piece of architecture, beautifully detailed and crafted. The decision to put the bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground
floor and the communal spaces above makes the experience of the house very special as perhaps the most impressive spaces are the outdoor Tudor and Jacobean ruins.

Location details

Astley Castle sits on a site originally owned by the Astley family in the 12th century, in Nuneaton, north Warwickshire.