This East Lothian house is no longer at the mercy of the elements, thanks to an ingenious architectural rethink

A wind of change has blown through Kilberry House in rural East Lothian over the last six years. It all began with homeowners Ben and Alison Walker nearly getting knocked off their feet by the howling gales that would whip across the long flat fields surrounding their cottage, and through the narrow gap between it and the adjacent hay barn. “You’d get out of the car with your shopping,” Ben recalls, “and you couldn’t even carry it to the back door some days. We’d get absolutely battered; it was like a wind tunnel. We wanted to create some sort of structure there, just to give us a windbreak, really. That was our starting point.”

Gareth Jones and Daryl Robbins, from award-winning architectural practice Jones Robbins Tobin, were brought in with a view to designing a series of garden rooms and sheltered terraces that would protect the house from the weather and allow Ben and Alison and their teenage daughter Ellie to start better enjoying Kilberry’s abundant outdoor space and panoramic countryside views. These, after all, had been what had attracted them to the fivebedroom 1980s build in the first place, when they bought it back in 2019.

A glass link between the cottage and the barn, a few short metres away to the south-east, was devised as a new entry point to the home and an elegant solution to helping the family get their groceries in the door unruffled by the elements. It also served to pull the barn closer into the fabric of the main dwelling; from its upper floor, it has the best vistas southwards towards the Garleton hills (now through a newly added slim dormer window). The Walkers were so impressed with the architects’ ideas that the project gradually developed into something bigger.

“We ended up taking on more and more parts,” Gareth Jones explains. “Now the whole house has been fully renovated.” “This is Gareth’s house,” says Ben, laughing. “He’s really treated this project like it’s his home,” Alison adds. “That has been so special for me. He has been so invested. The joke’s become: ‘Well, what do you think Gareth would like?’, but said in a very meaningful way, because he cares so much.”

The fundamental structure of the house has changed very little and, insofar as possible, the architects have sought to reimagine and recontextualise pre-existing spaces, fabrics and features. And yet, both outside and in, you’d struggle to reconcile the super-stylish new home (with furnishings and interior design by BoConcept) with the tired-looking and illogically laid-out Kilberry of old. Main contractor Peter McBean was instrumental in the success of this project.

Take the hay barn, for example, which Ben describes as being “wasted space” in its previous incarnation. Freshly clad in building. With its cinema room and upstairs entertaining area with a view, it’s where any good evening of socialising or quiet slouching begins and often ends. “If we’ve got friends round, we can go there and have drinks before we sit down to dinner,” says Ben. “You get the nice view and the sunset. Then we’ve got the cinema room where we can settle in and watch a movie.”

This is an excerpt from issue 163 of Homes & Interiors Scotland. Want to read more? Buy your issue here.

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