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GARDEN BUILDING, STRAWBERRY HILL
Visitor information and Gardener's office
Inskip & Jenkins Architects
2014

Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill was reopened to the public in September 2010 following a comprehensive restoration of the Grade I listed house and garden by Inskip & Jenkins Architects. As part of a second phase of works, I&J were commissioned to reconfigure the entrance sequence, re-establishing the historic approach to the house, and to provide a facility for garden staff and volunteers containing welfare facilities, gardener’s office and records, as well as visitor information. The character of the building is informed by garden architecture in the western villa garden building tradition. At Strawberry Hill the new building has been considered as a fluid woodland edge form on the garden side with no openings; as if imagined as a hedged enclosure. The footprint is shaped to accommodate a mature Black Poplar metres from the external wall. The new building is of timber balloon frame  construction, clad in naturally coloured cedar boarding all round with a planted sedum roof, bedding it into the landscape. From the Library windows, it is largely screened but could be noticed (perhaps in winter) as an echo of the structure in Barrow’s view of 1789, a low rustic enclosure with extensive planting emerging from the landscape.
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A row of existing Hornbeam trees and the restored shrubbery inspired the planting of a further line Hornbeams to re-establish the tree-arched lane - the former Road to Hampton Court - shown on J C Barrow's painting of 1791 . The recovered lane forms the primary approach to the villa from the east for all visitors, as was the case in the Eighteenth Century. ​
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