RIBA Award Wins for Studio Cottage

We’re proud to announce that Studio Cottage has received a 2025 RIBA Award for the South West and Wessex Region, our first RIBA accolade, and a proud milestone for our practice.

This was a five-year labour of love, a quietly ambitious project that demanded craft, commitment, and the steady navigation of technical complexity. It was delivered through close collaboration with the talented team at Ashton Architecture and Rebecca Milton Architect, alongside the excellent work of Carson Contractors.

We were especially pleased to see John Ashton recognised as Project Architect of the Year – a well-deserved honour for his creativity and leadership across the life of the project.

A Holistic Transformation

Studio Cottage, located just outside Cirencester on the edge of the Cotswolds AONB, is a thoughtful and meticulous repair and adaptation of a Grade II-listed arts and crafts cottage and thatched outbuilding. Originally designed in 1932 by Alfred Hoare Powell as a summer retreat and pottery studio, the timber-framed buildings have been sensitively brought together to form a single family home with independent guest accommodation. The design approach sought to honour the character and charm of the original structures while integrating new interventions with clarity and care.

The new work by Ashton Architecture and Rebecca Milton Architect includes a carefully judged glazed link, a new stair, and an independent outbuilding. These additions are crafted with a refined contemporary language, using galvanised corrugated cladding, open-jointed Cotswold stone, and fine metalwork details. The result is a home that is functionally improved and enriched in character, with the new elements confidently contributing their own architectural identity.

The project also included a considered reworking of the landscape. Bold new concrete and gravel surfaces define the approach and enhance the garden setting. A separate ancillary building, discreetly sited among mature trees, provides a guest bedroom, living space, office, and garage, supporting the main house while preserving the integrity of the listed buildings.

A Unique Structural Challenge

At the heart of the project was a deceptively simple glazed link between two distinct timber-framed buildings, intended to be a clean, minimal structure. But simplicity in appearance often requires engineering gymnastics behind the scenes.

On one side stood a post-and-beam roundwood timber structure, topped with a traditional thatched roof. On the other, an oak cruck frame building rotated roughly 30 degrees in plan. The geometry alone added complexity, particularly when paired with a need for large openings to all four sides of the link building.

The link building needed to accommodate the radically different stiffness characteristics of the two original structures. Our solution was a slender steel frame braced with structurally bonded glass to provide lateral stability while reading visually as little more than a crisp glass box. The thatched annex building was braced with OSB sheathing to increase its lateral stiffness and allow it to contribute to the stability of the glazed link.

Care in Every Detail

The design challenge was to allow the oak cruck frame to behave independently under wind and lateral loads, while still providing overall stability to the link structure – and doing so with a continuous, weatherproof junction.

This required detailed analysis and meticulous detailing to address the differential stiffness between the two adjoining structures.

All steel elements were fabricated from bespoke plate components, allowing us to create fully tailored geometries for each column and beam. The listed buildings required their original cladding to be retained, leaving virtually no room for conventional structural solutions.

The steelwork also integrated a structural gutter to keep elements as small as possible, and we coordinated closely with the architect and contractor to streamline the waterproofing and flashing details to achieve the clean finish.

More Than Just a Link

What began as a structural challenge ended as a beautifully balanced architectural moment, that quietly unites two expressive buildings without competing with either. We had a fantastic night at the RIBA Awards ceremony celebrating this achievement with friends and collaborators. For our small studio, this is more than a trophy, it’s recognition of what can happen when creative minds work with care and rigour toward a shared goal.