Exquisite craftsmanship and thoughtful design combine in this award-winning reimagining of a traditional Highland farmstead

It took approximately ten minutes for the architect Ben Addy and the interdisciplinary artist Naomi Mcintosh to fall for their farmstead in rural Aberdeenshire. The couple were living in London at the time – where Ben’s practice, Moxon Architects, was founded – and had just been to a wedding in Yorkshire when they decided to keep driving north to visit the idyllic place they’d spotted online.

“I was completely astonished by it,” says Ben, who grew up in Aboyne and had long yearned for a return to the bucolic landscapes of his childhood. Ardoch, a cluster of 19th century agricultural buildings gathered on a grassy hillside in the Cairngorms National Park, had pinch-yourself views in every direction: the slopes and swells of the Dee valley to the west, Lochnagar’s noble peaks to the south. “It’s bang on the centre line of the valley, so you have this perfect view,” adds Ben. “It’s magical.”

Part of its charm lay in its lore

The previous owner, a sheep farmer named Robert Bain, had lived at Ardoch with his mother Jean, the last native speaker of Deeside Gaelic – a dialect previously presumed to have died out a century before.

As for the track connecting the buildings?

It was laid for Queen Victoria so she could look down on Balmoral from Creag a’ Chalamain. “The farmhouse is just a but’n’ben, so for a building like that to have such an extraordinary outlook, combined with a fascinating human history, is really quite remarkable,” says Ben.

Also remarkable, though for less positive reasons, was the state of the derelict buildings.

According to Moxon Architects, they’d lain empty for a few years

The farmhouse, where Ben and Naomi would live, was uninhabitable. Rain sloshed through the gaps left by missing windows. The walls and roof of the cattle shed had partially caved in, while a farm store at the rear of the site had collapsed entirely. “Even the cornerstones were missing,” laughs Naomi. “It was kind of like Jenga, piecing it all back together.”

They didn’t tackle everything at once. Ben’s brother Tom Addy, who runs Tor Workshop in Braemar, renovated the farmhouse first, retaining its characterful stone walls and keeping the interventions to a minimum, save for a new rooflight.

The couple moved in and got to know their new home intimately. Long days were spent with their hands in the soil, planting trees (450 of them) and reinstating the kaleyard, previously overrun with bracken, old boots and pots and pans.

After a year or so they even got married in the grounds, ceilidh dancing on the remains of the farm store’s concrete floor.

Finding purpose

Over time, and with careful thought, they settled on a purpose for each of the outbuildings. “It was a slow process, really working out what we needed, what our lives looked like, and how to create a world that is not temporary,” reflects Naomi.

The cattle shed would be a guesthouse; the farm store a glasshouse; and a farmstead once used to winter sheep would become Naomi’s studio. As they grew to understand the place better, something interesting happened.

“The more we progressed, the simpler our ideas became,” says Ben. “Everything kind of wound back from what might have been an ambitious, typical architect’s way of looking at things to something much more vernacular. Not an emulation of a vernacular but actual vernacular, in that I did a lot of the work myself on the buildings alongside some exquisitely talented joiners, metalworkers, stonemasons and slaters.”

This is an excerpt from an architecture feature with Moxon Architects in issue 156 of Homes & Interiors Scotland

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