Hastings House East Sussex house, Hugh Strange Architects modern Southern English home, Architecture photos
Hastings House, East Sussex, UK
22 November 2025
RIBA House of the Year 2025 Shortlist
4 September 2025
Design: Hugh Strange Architects
Location: Hastings, East Sussex, Southern England, United Kingdom.
Hastings House by Hugh Strange Architects makes Stirling Prize 2025 Shortlist
Photos by Rory Gaylor
Jury citation:
Hastings House – Modern East Sussex Property
The eccentric late 19th-century Hastings House perches on a west-facing slope just above the town centre, sandwiched between the street and a secondary rear access road. Hugh Strange Architects embraced the awkward three-storey level change across the site to turn an otherwise mundane domestic refurbishment project into a game of concrete structural repair and new interlocking timber-framed rooms.
The detached house is barely altered and beautifully refurbished, retaining fine mouldings, stained glass, fretted barge boards and decorative hung clay tiles. At ground-floor level, however, the openings in its rear wall – which previously accessed a gloomy full-width lean-to extension – are adjusted, with no loss of solidity, to form a threshold into a new world of cellular spaces that ascend the rear terraced garden.
Wide timber-framed sliding glass doors, which enclose the new rooms, open onto a repaired but still rough concrete yard that has the promise of becoming the most important room in the house. A galvanised steel staircase skirts the patched retaining wall to its rear, to reach a shelf-like pathway where a cherry laurel clings to its edge, and unpretentious concrete blockwork walls form planted beds. A pergola of bolted galvanised steel sections tops off the pile of architecture at the upper road level.
The complex articulation of the new structures, with their finely detailed joinery (both fabric and fitted) set against the found vertical garden of roughly cast concrete and basic blockwork, strikes a very poetic chord. It is both charming and intriguing, and clearly very liveable – despite the perhaps disconcerting absence of furniture in the plans and photographs.
The client is now so fluent in the language of relaxed repair and carefully crafted interventions that, since occupation, he has undertaken his own self-design-and-build kitchen-garden project on the front garden terrace, where his produce can soak up the afternoon sunshine.
Photos: Rory Gaylor
Stirling Prize 2025 Shortlist building + architects
Hastings House, East Sussex images / information received from the RIBA, England, UK
Location: Hastings, East Sussex, southern England, United Kingdom.
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Comments / photos for the Hastings House, East Sussex: Hugh Strange Architects – Southern England property page welcome
