Hastings House

by Hugh Strange Architects

Client Private

Award RIBA South East Award 2025

The award winner tells us: "The careful repair of the concrete terraces of a steeply sloping rear garden in Hastings suggests a metaphor of darning: of precise interventions of anchoring and patching, in place of demolition and replacement, stitching the dilapidated site towards reuse.

Inserted onto this mended hillside, a series of lightweight timber structures allow the existing Victorian dwelling to reorientate towards the outside spaces. A sense of interconnection, natural light, and far, layered views now replaces the previously dark and isolated ground-floor rooms of the house. A new route, formed with both repaired and new elements, winds up the rear garden, tying buildings and landscape together."

The jury says: " The detached house is barely altered and beautifully refurbished, retaining fine mouldings, stained glass, fretted barge boards and decorative hung clay tiles. At ground-floor level, however, the openings in its rear wall – which previously accessed a gloomy full-width lean-to extension – are adjusted, with no loss of solidity, to form a threshold into a new world of cellular spaces that ascend the rear terraced garden. Wide timber-framed sliding glass doors, which enclose the new rooms, open onto a repaired but still rough concrete yard that has the promise of becoming the most important room in the house."

Read the full citation from the RIBA Awards Jury on RIBA Journal

Structural engineer Price & Myers

Environmental / M&E engineer Ritchie + Daffin

Gross internal area 209m²