Architects & interiorsRye / HaldenSince 2011
Houses, cabins and second lives for old buildings.
Nine architects between the Sussex marshes and the Norwegian coast. We draw slowly and build with the people who will live there.
Move across the sky
Two old buildings given a second life and two small new ones, from a Sussex barn to a Finnish lake. Scroll: each one takes the whole screen.
Project 01 / 04Adaptive reuseIden Marsh, East Sussex
A seven-bay barn that stored grain, then tractors, then nothing. We set one oak-lined box inside it for everything that needs a door, and left the rest open to the roof, 7.4 metres above the kitchen table.
41 old timbers repaired, 3 replaced
Project 02 / 04Adaptive reuseBrede Valley, East Sussex
A Victorian brick workshop, empty for twenty-two years. Nine homes now hang from new timber lofts under four north lights, above a joinery the residents share on the old workshop floor.
The chimney became the stack that cools the building
Project 03 / 04New buildTenterden, Kent
A glasshouse that leans on a south-facing garden wall and on nothing else. The old brick soaks up heat all day and gives it back after dark, so the lemons stay out all winter.
Any broken pane replaced from the merchant in town the same afternoon
Project 04 / 04New buildLake Iso-Kivi, Central Finland
A wood-fired sauna on four granite pads that touches the slope nowhere else. Three aspen benches face one low window cut at water level, so you sit in the heat and watch the lake at eye height.
A cedar ladder drops straight into four metres of lake
ProcessA typical small house
From the first site visit to the day the builder leaves takes about a year. The four stages never change. What changes is how long we let each one breathe.
From week00
We spend the first days on site with a tape, a level and the people who will live there. The brief is written together and priced before anything is drawn.
From week06
Pencil on tracing paper and card models at 1:200. We show three options, always including one that keeps more of what is there than you asked for.
From week14
Planning, building regulations and a full construction set. Every junction the builder will ask about is drawn at 1:5, and the tricky ones at full size.
Week 30 to 5830
We are on site every week, not every month. Changes are drawn up the same day, so the work never waits for a sketch.
StudioRye since 2011Halden since 2018
Ingrid Halden trained in Oslo and Tom Rye in London. They met measuring a collapsing granary in 2009 and opened the studio two years later in a former sail loft in Rye. A second studio, in a timber warehouse in Halden, followed in 2018.
We stay small on purpose. Every project is led by a partner from the first visit to handover, and we never take on more than eight at a time.
PressWhat others have written
They make buildings that look as if they had been waiting on the site for the drawings to catch up.
Editor’s letter, The Timber Review, No. 58, spring 2026
Coastal Building Prize, winner, small building
North Sea Timber Award, shortlist, Iso-Kivi Sauna
Weald Heritage Awards, commendation, Brede Mill
ContactReplies within five working days
Send a few lines and, if you have them, a postcode and a photo taken from the gate. One of the partners reads every enquiry.