Corinna Dean has a thing for “ugly” buildings — industrial relics, cold war oddities, pillbox military defences and agricultural remnants that many see as a blight on Britain’s bucolic landscapes. This passion bloomed when the architectural curator and lecturer was a child, during car journeys down the coastal stretch of the A1 from Edinburgh. She found herself transfixed by the Torness Power Station reactor hall as it shimmered in the sunshine in an eerily flat landscape. “My mother would teasingly point out, ‘There’s Corinna’s favourite building’ every time we passed,” she says.
Dean, an artist and lecturer in architecture at the University of Westminster, later travelled the UK and Europe to document such overlooked buildings, producing two volumes of a book named Slacklands in reference to the neglected land around these often abandoned sites. “I wanted to encourage people to re-evaluate the aesthetics of our rural landscapes,” she explains. “It’s the anti-picture postcard view.”
Dean and her partner Marcus Lee, founder of architecture studio LEEP, recently found their own slackland — a concrete, metal and weed-strewn paradise in the Suffolk countryside. At its centre were four defunct agricultural buildings: a Grade II-listed, c16th-century timber barn, two galvanised steel grain sheds and a silo that creaked in the wind. When they bought the plot in 2021, the barn had planning permission for conversion into a family home. But it was the metal chutes, steel grain drums and rusty panels of the newer buildings, likely from the 1960s, that held the real charm for the couple. “They’re very basic farm buildings, but they have this rich patina and history that you can’t recreate,” says Lee.
Today, as you rattle your way down the bumpy farm track, you’d be forgiven for thinking work hasn’t begun on their conversion, so discreet is the transformation. But once you step through the metal threshold, you find a home far cosier than the exterior would imply. With exposed timber beams and pillars, textiles lining the walls, minimal ply kitchen cupboards, orange sofas and a wood-burning stove, it has a stripped-back mid-century style that exudes a laid-back warmth, much like the owners. Full-length windows throughout mean it is never dingy.
The process wasn’t without its problems. A planning officer told them the structures would have to be pulled down due to the harm their close proximity could cause to the 16th-century barn — a ruling that they felt was “part of this general prettification of the countryside at the expense of its agricultural character”, says Lee. “We managed to convince them that given the climate crisis and the embodied carbon in the building materials, demolition without considering their potential wouldn’t be a good thing. Our aim was to retain as much as we could, while making the site a place we could live.”
Instead they agreed to go down the Class Q permitted development route for the metal barns, which allows for the conversion of farm buildings into “dwelling houses” without full planning permission. Class Q requires the agricultural qualities of buildings and their surroundings to be retained, but cannot be applied to listed structures. (The couple have kept the wooden barn unchanged, save for a new roof; it now stores timber salvaged from one of Lee’s London projects.)
Lee and Dean camped in one of the grain sheds while planning the design. One source of inspiration was the black-and-white photographs of grain elevators, water towers and barns by German duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, which celebrate the sculptural profiles of these vernacular structures, as well as the light-touch renovation projects of French practice Lacaton & Vassal — a “quiet architecture”, says Dean. “They try not to remove much.”
Their “agri-industrial approach”, as they call it, became a delicate exercise in subtraction and addition. One grain shed remains untouched, acting as an outdoor living area and a garage for Lee’s vintage Saabs. In the other, they inserted a new Douglas fir-framed pavilion inside the shell, removing just a few panels of the original structure to allow sunlight to reach the solar panels on the new flat roof inside. The largely prefabricated, larch-clad pavilion is shorter than the length of the shed, allowing space for a porch at one end and a glazed winter garden at the other — “a peaceful sanctuary where I plan to sit and read”, says Dean. It has become their main home, though they retain a base in London.
Lee, a self-described modernist, has built several new homes for himself over the years, alongside converting existing buildings. Like his timber 2005 Framehouse in east London, which won a RIBA award for architectural excellence, the two-bedroom pavilion has no load-bearing internal walls, so it can be easily reconfigured. “It’s about allowing flexibility, because who could have predicted Covid and the shift to working from home?” he asks.
The architect also organises spaces into “served and servant” areas, a tactic he learnt from 21 years working at the Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP), where his projects included London’s Lloyd’s Building and terminals for Heathrow and Madrid Barajas airports. “It’s a way of bringing some rigour to a design,” he says. In this case, he dissected the pavilion with a service wall — concealing washing machines and the boiler behind plywood joinery in an artful zigzag formation. A coffee table in the open-plan living area is topped with a piece of rolled glass left over from the construction of the Lloyd’s Building; it sparkles in the sunlight.
The couple gave the silo — now a guest annexe and workspace — a lighter touch. They removed a vast metal grain-drying drum to open up the space, and added glazing to the east and west sides. They also made a feature of one of the building’s enormous grain storage underbellies by retaining the see-through metal mesh floor. Walls are lined in SisalTech insulation, made from recycled sisal and waste wool from Harris Tweed, its cosy texture left partially exposed. “It makes the space both feel and look warm,” says Dean. They retained defunct metal light switches, sockets and the old grain elevators encased in wooden columns. “I was nervous about taking away too much,” she adds. A guest bedroom is walled off by a simple wooden frame.
Where possible, they have reused any metal that they had to remove. Corrugated wall panels are refashioned as plant boxes and sections of the silo’s drum have been reimagined as curved outdoor chairs. Other parts of the drum, including a huge pipe, now poke up from clumps of sedge: along with found agricultural objects, they make up what the couple half-seriously dub their “sculpture garden”.
All the buildings overlook a centuries-old horse pond, created to quench the thirst of working animals. (Few examples remain, as many have been filled in to make space for agriculture.) “It was full of car windscreens and rusting metal when we moved in,” says Dean. They bought a small canoe on eBay to pull them out and remove the green blanket of duckweed that was stifling aquatic life.
To boost the ecology of the pond, Dean took cues from her recent work with a charity to help decontaminate London’s River Lea, adding floating reed beds to offer a nesting place for moorhens. Dean is also influenced by French botanist and gardener Gilles Clément’s belief that neglected or unmanaged spaces (road edges, abandoned factories, wastelands, for example) are vital reservoirs of biodiversity. “Rather than introducing lots of new species, I’ve just used flints from the fields to suppress an overabundance of nettles, removed small patches of concrete and enhanced the conditions for nature to take hold,” she adds.
Wild hops now trail over decking made from a fibreglass mesh that was reclaimed from a data centre, and marsh marigolds thrive at the water’s edge — although Dean has planted some drought-tolerant euphorbias and sedums for a dash of formality in the courtyard beside the barn. “It’s never going to look manicured,” she says. “Nor will the barns or landscape ever be ‘finished.’”
The project is about challenging notions of beauty and an unspoilt rural arcadia. They hope that their home will inspire others to take slices of defunct 20th-century technology and agriculture and see them reappraised and reborn.
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