Suffolk Architect David Walker swaps designing large commercial buildings for renovating his own bungalow

Slowly does it

At a leisurely pace, architect David Walker has turned a Suffolk bungalow into something more like a barn

Words / Jonathan Bell Images / Timothy Soar

The architect David Walker is best known for his practice’s major works in London, ranging from large-scale offices to hotels and apartment buildings. Born in Canada in 1957, Walker studied architecture in California and New York, before taking a master’s degree at Yale, where his teachers included Frank Gehry and Cesar Pelli. Prior to setting up his own studio in London in 2002, Walker worked for SOM and Swanke Hayden Connell Architects.

Walker’s country retreat in Suffolk forms a stark counterpoint to the work of his practice, DWA. The studio’s portfolio includes the bold, colourful facade of 2010’s Riverbank House and The Heron, adjacent to the Barbican, which incorporates the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court building. These projects and others have won numerous accolades, including recognition from the UK’s Civic Trust Awards for the way in which they integrate into the ancient and eclectic cityscape.

The wilds of Suffolk couldn’t be further in spirit from the City of London. “We’d been looking for a place to go away to for a long time,” says Walker from his London studio. “We’d found a rubbish house with beautiful views in Wales, and I set my heart on it. We got into a bidding war – at the height of the recession – and we lost it.” Instead, the couple flipped their search from west to east, looking closer to home along the Suffolk coast. This stretch of the UK is renowned for its open landscapes and beaches and has long been a favoured spot for creative types seeking a retreat from London.

In among the low-rise, low-density of seaside suburbia, they eventually stumbled across a diamond in the rough. “We found the house on the outskirts of Aldeburgh with an amazing site but a terrible interior,” Walker recalls. “The site looked out across open land because it’s right next to the town’s golf course.” In many respects, it was the perfect blank slate. “There were some interesting ideas in there,” he says diplomatically of the house, a 1960s bungalow allegedly built by the president of the golf club (hence the prime site). Its most successful features were its large windows, but the original internal plan was convoluted and didn’t make the most of the space.

After buying the house, the couple decided to spend a while living in it just as it was. “We were exploring ways of what our home could be,” says Walker. Out of this came the first phase of construction, completed about a year later, which involved completely gutting the interior and creating a new layout. The singlestorey house is arranged in a U-shape, around a central courtyard. The west wing houses the living, dining and kitchen areas, with a corridor that snakes around the internal courtyard, past four bedrooms, until it culminates in a family room. “We made the public spaces much more engaging and dynamic,” Walker explains, “whereas before it was a horrible mess, with a low ceiling.” Walls were removed and the main living space was opened up and the ceiling raised, with new brick walls to support the new structural beams. The kitchen is connected to this main space, set behind the brick. The generous existing window openings were retained, with the new layout delivering better sightlines to connect to the garden.

The expanded living room makes the most of the bungalow’s original pitched roof, with a lofty raised ceiling that’s mirrored by timber floors underfoot. Slate tile flooring unites the

Previous page David Walker’s home in Suffolk, incrementally remodelled and unrecognisable from the 1960s bungalow the architect first acquired Facing page The house’s pitched roof has been opened up to create a more generous feeling of space, with its timber ceiling beams whitewashed

This page Clockwise from left: mid-century classics furnish the dining area, echoing the house’s 1960s origins; the original house’s generously proportioned glazing has been retained; a more open layout creates better visual connections between inside and out

Facing page A pared-back palette soothes the eye, with warm natural timber and white-painted brickwork

rest of the house. “The bedrooms are still quite modest, but the public spaces are much larger,” says Walker. “It also wasn’t well insulated or heated, so we put in a ground source heat pump.” After the works to create the new layout, the house has been continuously added to, inside and out, over the years. One recent addition was the first floor sleeping area, a dorm room containing four beds and its own workspace and bathroom, set in the eaves above the bedroom wing.

Outside there is a new greenhouse and studio space, both carefully sited within a meticulous garden scheme designed in collaboration with Brita von Schoenaich of the award-winning Bradley-Hole Schoenaich Landscape. The studio is a strictly low-tech space, with a covered passage, potting shed and playroom/ workspace. The surrounding planting carefully blurs the distinction between inside and out, with low walls, courtyards, gravel and brick; the overall site plan resembles a masterful deStijl-like composition of grids and lines.

The final piece of the jigsaw was recently completed. “We remodelled the outside of the house and replaced the original roof which had these great big overhanging eaves,” says Walker. “It made all the liminal spaces around the edge of the plan very dark and gloomy. Now the house has a modesty and quality of proportions that was missing from the original plans, plus you always have this transparency through the house.” As before, every detail was subject to high levels of scrutiny, such as the individually fixed exterior cladding slats that are juxtaposed with the white-painted brickwork.

“For an architect, this house was done in exactly the wrong way – from the inside out,” Walker says. “It’s been a long labour of love. Like getting tattoos, you get addicted to the process.” Architects’ own houses are often places of experimentation and a slow pace of change. “It’s a strange thing to be able to do whatever you want,” he adds, pointing out that spending money to make things look ‘ordinary’ is a hard thing to sell to a client, whether private or commercial. “For the kind of work we normally do in large-scale urban commercial buildings, what we’ve always engaged with is their responsibility to their setting. Because of their location, there’s often the budget to do something special. You don’t always get that in domestic work.”

In many respects, the house provided the perfect chance to enact this slow architectural approach. “There are a lot of suburban sixties houses here, set in the middle of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. We wanted to push the house towards a more modest, rural building,” the architect says. “It’s conceived of as a kind of barn – you can see all the structure. The idea was to make it look original.”

The lack of deadlines allowed key pieces to have care (and money) lavished on them. For example, the kitchen island is a bespoke piece of solid maple, a meticulously crafted object that many commercial clients would baulk at: “Most people wouldn’t even realise it was solid wood. But I know.” Walker adds that “people are always asking architects if they want to design their dream house. This wasn’t really like that – it was an incremental, organic process.”

There’s an important final question to be asked – is it finished? “I have a vision to do something more in the garden,” Walker admits. “The house is still a canvas to be worked on.”

Facing page The bungalow now has an extra storey, with a four-bed dorm room, a bathroom and working area

Facing page The exterior of the house was one of the last things to be remodelled, with deep eaves removed and timber slats added Above Brita von Schoenaich designed the garden, where flowers naturalistically tumble over gravel pathways

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