The planners required that any new building on the site must be an extension to a tiny neglected gamekeeper's cottage and that it be subordinate to it in scale. End of project.

Instead, the architect and the client successfully argued for a series of dry stone walls and terraces in which the house is buried under grass roofs. The result is a house of substantial scale that does not overwhelm the cottage, with its linear form exploited to create an unfolding sequence of spaces of special character.