Residential · Forge Conversion
Old Forge is the conversion of a former forge and outbuilding at Chenies, Buckinghamshire into a striking single-storey family home. The design retains and celebrates the original reclaimed brickwork — exposed internally as feature arches and a dual-sided fireplace — while a new glazed pitched roof structure floods the double-height living space with daylight. A sculptural spiral staircase rises to a mezzanine gallery, and the brief extended through to fully detailed bathrooms and a reconfigured kitchen, where a salvaged brick archway frames the route through to the entrance hall.
Number 28 Village Road sits on the green at Chenies, a Buckinghamshire village whose historic heart it helps form. The house and its neighbour at Number 29 are a Grade II listed pair; the forge itself was built in 1840 within the curtilage of the manor house, and appears on the Tithe plan of 1838 when the plot was described as a “House, Shop and Garden” on the Duke of Bedford’s estate.
By the time we were commissioned, the outbuilding was derelict. The brief was to turn it into a two-bedroom family home without erasing what made it worth keeping.
The building could not be converted without a change of use from agricultural to residential, and any intervention had to satisfy a conservation officer assessing work within the curtilage of a listed building. That meant establishing what was actually there before proposing anything.
We built a chronology from the archive — the 1838 Tithe plan, Ordnance Survey maps of 1880, 1900 and 1925, and a 1949 aerial photograph confirming the rear lean-to and outbuilding — and tested it against what we found on site. The roof purlins carried face-halved and bladed scarf joints, a technique in use from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The cellar walls mixed flint and brick. Not every layer was equally significant, and saying which was which is what made a sensitive scheme arguable.
The structure was sound but functionally obsolete: roof tiles delaminating, ground levels uneven, insulation non-existent, the original trusses rotting.
A dusk survey was required, and bats are protected in the UK. Because the requirement landed late in the year, the survey could not be carried out until the following spring — a delay of roughly six months that no amount of design work could shorten.
We took the consents in sequence rather than attempting them at once. The first application established the principle of residential use. Only once that consent had been implemented and building control approval obtained could a second application for the rear extension be made — the original footprint was too small for the client’s brief, but the extension was not arguable until the change of use was secured and built.
Two original furnaces, arching towards a shared chimney, were retained and converted into fireplaces — a detail the contractor and consultants had to solve from first principles. The roof structure was opened up to expose the trusses. Reclaimed brick was left visible internally, and the rusting original windows were replaced with powder-coated steel.
Five years from commission to completion. The forge now holds two bedrooms with en-suites, a living room, kitchen and cloakroom, with an excavated rear garden and water feature. The building grew from 83 to 101.7 sqm net internal area — 915 to 1,238 square feet gross, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, which also put the project cost at approximately $707,000 including landscaping.