Project of the year: a modern take on the country house by the duo behind Pinch
One Sunday morning towards the end of 2013, Russell Pinch found himself browsing properties on The Modern House website, while having a rare lie-in at home in London. Buried many pages deep was a dilapidated ice-cream factory not far from the south Devon coast, with planning permission for conversion into a family home. ‘We weren’t in the market for a project,’ says his wife Oona Bannon. ‘We had already given 10 years of our life to building a house in France.’ But, a few days later, they drove down to Devon – ‘just to have a peek’.
What they found, tucked in a valley near Torquay, would have held little promise to most: a cob barn strewn with ivy and some rickety lean-tos. But Oona and Russell, founders of furniture company Pinch – which celebrates its 20th birthday this year – could see the ‘monastic beauty’ of the barn, with its soaring ceiling and curved wall. And the architect behind the planning proposal was the multi-award-winning David Kohn.
The couple could not ignore such a special opportunity. ‘It is rare to get permission for a piece of rigorous modern architecture in a rural spot so close to the sea,’ says Russell. And it was far enough from London that they could afford to buy it and take on the conversion in stages, with the aim of creating an inviting weekend refuge for themselves and their two daughters.
The barn was part of a dairy farm owned by artist Suzanne Blank Redstone and her husband Peter Redstone. They started the UK’s first organic ice-cream brand, Rocombe Farm Fresh Ice Cream, in the 1980s, which had a cult following. ‘I recognised the packaging on the factory floor from my childhood,’ recalls Russell. The Redstones sold the company to Yeo Valley in 2000 and the factory closed, but the brand’s cow logo – hand-sculpted by Suzanne – remains on the wall today. ‘It is part of the story of the building,’ Russell says. When the Redstones decided to convert a cluster of their farm buildings, they called in David to create a master plan and design the houses.
David is known for his purity of form and his emphasis on materiality, a design vocabulary that is shared by Pinch. ‘We spoke the same language,’ says Oona. ‘He respected the rigour of our furniture collection and understood our need to escape to somewhere that felt simple but nourishing, with a sense of effortlessness. Like our own designs.’
The architect was particularly taken with Pinch’s ‘Joyce’ cabinet, with its sliding glazed façade, open shelves and closed drawers. ‘It’s like a piece of architecture in miniature, with layers that you reveal over time, much like a house,’ he explains. ‘We conceived of several parts of the building rather like large pieces of furniture. The library room and stairs take the form of one homogenous wooden piece, created with the trademark Pinch craftsmanship, quality of materials and attention to detail.’
The couple worked closely with David to adapt the original plans to their needs, while negotiating various tight restrictions. ‘We couldn’t build higher than the barn, or extend the footprint much beyond the existing lean-tos,’ Russell says. So, instead, they dug down, creating a sequence of volumes that span away from the barn and descend into the hillside.
Visitors enter through a steel door – a nod to the site’s industrial past – framed in poured concrete. They walk into a partly glazed internal courtyard to the left of the barn (which now houses the children’s rooms), before descending to a sitting room-cum-library, with its mono-pitch roof rising above. A curved staircase leads down to a semi-subterranean kitchen, while another sweeps up to a gallery, leading to the main bedroom and a spare room.
David suggested creating an element of theatre inside the house by giving glimpses into different spaces as you move through it as well as to the hillside beyond. ‘There is a sense of seeing others and being seen, with the landscapes as backdrops,’ he explains. Internal windows in the gallery level provide additional drama. New parts of the building are clad in Devon pink sandstone, unpointed for added texture, while picture windows frame the hillside and woodlands, making the modest bedrooms feel big.
As you would expect from the Pinch duo, wood abounds inside, adding warmth and softening hard lines. They took cues from the home and furniture of American artist Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street (now open for tours) in New York’s SoHo. ‘We’ve always loved his respect for the simple wooden block,’ says Russell. A visit to a gallery in Mexico City also proved pivotal; its palette of wood, concrete, white paint and dark accents guided their vision.
‘We’d run out of money once we had the architectural shell in 2017, so we did everything ourselves, camping inside while we worked,’ Russell explains. They struck a deal with Danish flooring company Dinesen to purchase a mixed batch of its douglas fir ends and highly grained pieces, and used them to hand-craft everything from flooring and kitchen cabinets to bookshelves and the sculptural staircase. ‘We designed these around the module of a 32mm-thick plank in varying lengths,’ says Russell. ‘We had the parts machine-cut, then I installed everything with help from my father. It was like the most insane flatpack assembly imaginable, with thousands of pieces to slot into place.’
The wood tones offset the concrete ceilings and unplastered breeze-block walls on the ground floor, painted a soft white. Almost everything inside the house is a Pinch design, other than a few antique chairs, oil paintings and wall hangings sourced from dealers in Ashburton, artist friends and 8 Holland Street.
‘When we are missing something in our home, we see it as a gap in our collection,’ says Russell. It makes sense, given that they founded Pinch to create elegant and refined furniture and lighting that they would want to live with. Among the many new pieces specifically made for the house – and now added to the Pinch collection – is the ‘Soren’ globe light that hangs in the library, its sphere made from plant fibres that cast a soft glow over the yew ‘Rodan’ dining table. The faceted detailing on the ‘Mead’ coffee and dining tables, meanwhile, recalls the building’s cast-concrete handrails and lintels – but the pieces would look equally at home in a period townhouse in London.
‘In the lead-up to our 20th anniversary, this house has given us a place to reflect,’ says Oona. ‘It has renewed our commitment to creating furniture that feels human, nurturing and kind’.
Pinch: pinchdesign.com
Michael Sinclair1/2A vintage ‘Rex’ chair by Niko Kralj stands next to a potted Monstera deliciosa, which draws the eye out to the courtyard.
Michael Sinclair2/2The façade of the new building, in irregular-sized, unpointed pink sandstone, contrasts with the smooth, pale sandstone path, the rough gravel courtyard and the wood-clad garage and workshop with heavy metal doors. This perfectly exemplifies the shared fascination architect David Kohn and Russell and Oona have with materiality.
