Stalker, the 1979 sci-fi film by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, is a gloomy, troubling work. It describes a dangerous journey into a forbidden territory called the Zone, on which a writer and a scientist are guided by the eponymous Stalker. They are seeking “the room”, a place where your innermost desires are granted, which may not be a good thing. Death and suicide are among the consequences for at least some of those who reach it. Be careful what you wish for, you might say.
“It’s a bit strange,” muses the architect Adam Richards, “to base a house on such a bleak film.” Indeed. Such, though, is exactly what he has done with Nithurst Farm, the sweetly named house he has designed for himself and his family in the soft, green, gently grand landscape of West Sussex. The building has been shortlisted for the RIBA House of the Year award, the winner of which will be unveiled on Channel 4’s Grand Designs on 13 November.
Richards, who is best known up to now for his sensitive additions to the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in East Sussex, has created a big hall that recalls a cathedral-like space that Tarkovsky’s pilgrims enter before they reach the room. It is finished in raw concrete, in emulation of the post-industrial aesthetic that Stalker (before Blade Runner, for example, riffed on comparable themes) helped to pioneer. The hall is a bit mysterious, with rectangular towers cutting into its trapezoidal outline, such that you can’t take in the whole space at once. Light comes round corners, through windows you can’t see when you first enter the room.
The hall, to put it in practical terms, contains the kitchen, a dining area and a raised children’s play zone; the towers contain supporting functions such as a utility room and a larder. At the far end, dead on the axis of what is a mostly symmetrical space, you enter a tight little passageway. You are then obliged to turn off the axis, left and then right, up a few steps, into the well-proportioned living room, filled with south light from high windows. A somewhat deadpan fireplace, which turns out to be the thing you circumnavigated on your way into the room, faces the glass; above it hangs a photograph by Simon Norfolk of the Large Hadron Collider. Fire plus atom-smasher: two versions of energy, you might say.
This living room, according to Richards’s Tarkovskian conceit, which has been reached in a spatially roundabout way, is the one where your desires come true. There are other ideas, meanwhile, dancing around in what is a regular party of inspirations. The hall has a debt to those of large medieval houses, where all human and animal life went on. The concrete oblongs owe something, Richards says, to enigmatic objects that appear in the drawings of the Renaissance Dutch perspectivist Hans Vredeman de Vries. The interrupted axis on the way from the hall to the living room is a device from Edwin Lutyens. On the upper floors of the house, behind what looks like a cupboard door, a staircase ascends to the light, in emulation of the celestial steps in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death.
All of which allusiveness could amount to little more than diverting chatter. Or, worse, a pretentious intellectual dressing to a design that may or may not have substance. The great thing about Nithurst Farm is that there is very much a there there. It is physically engaging and intriguing, the ferment of ideas having translated into a sort of compressed mineral energy. The building has both heft and bounce. Its weighty masonry seems always on the verge of springing into life.
Seen from a distance, approached down a slope from the nearest road, the house aspires to an antiquity beyond that of the traditional farmyard buildings among which it sits. With big, semicircular details, the depth of their brick reveals exaggerated for effect, it’s like (another allusion) a Roman ruin. At the same time the arches scatter across the elevation with nervy irregularity, the one at the top-left corner seeming to want to float away from its position altogether. To the sides of the windows are horizontal smudges of darker brickwork, which Richards says derive from the blurs that cartoonists apply to figures, to signify movement.
The profile of the building is stepped, echoing the slope of a hill behind, while adding to the general sense of mass in motion. The house, though, is not about to jump out of your way: you have to walk round it, in search of a deliberately underplayed blunt rectangle of a front door. This is all part of the game of offer and denial that runs through the project.
There are other subtleties. The mortar is unusually thick, such that you don’t know if you’re looking at little bricks or large joints, part of an ongoing ambiguity of scale. Sometimes the house seems smaller than it really is, sometimes bigger. What looks like rigid symmetry running down the spine of the house is undercut by varying window sill heights on either side, which set up contrasting relationships to the landscape outside. The materials – slightly mucky concrete, strong-grained timber floors – contribute to the feeling of innate liveliness. So do those subsidiary rooms buried in the concrete towers.
What holds it all together is the consistent logic of its construction, which is a concrete box wrapped in a brick outer wall, and the scale and effect of the hall. This is a stonking space, whose almost ludicrous monumentality manages to unbend into a rich array of niches and territories that serve the project’s primary purpose of creating a livable family home. The hall is all the better for not following the standard modern response – the panoramic glass wall – to a beautiful setting. Nature, seen from inside, unfolds, rather than being revealed all at once.
The living room, though handsome, is less potent than the hall. If this is the ultimate goal of the Stalker-inspired narrative, it turns out that it was better to travel than to arrive. And, in the end, the Tarkovsky theme has to fade away: it doesn’t continue upstairs, for one thing, and there is no way that architecture (especially of the domestic kind) can replicate the moral and emotional peril of the movie. You don’t really want to live with an unending fable of tragic impossibility.
It is not in fact necessary to know the Stalker story to enjoy this house. What the movie does contribute is in part a creative formwork or armature off which all the architectural devices can be constructed. It is also a useful antidote to the bland optimism, what Richards calls “fixed-grin architecture”, to which his profession is prone. It helps him to bring shadows and mystery – rather than outright misery – into his domestic universe.
At 397 square metres for a family of five, on a rare and blessed plot in rural England, Nithurst Farm is not, as the saying goes, going to solve the housing crisis. But, on its own terms, it succeeds. It seeks to enrich and deepen, both physically and perceptually, the experience of living in a house, and this it does brilliantly. The late Russian director, did he but know it, has certainly helped.
