Mill Hide is a house built for Tim and Elizabeth Poulson. The site is in the open countryside adjoining a nature reserve owned and managed by the RSPB.

Planning consent was granted in 2021 under the exemption clause Paragraph 79 NPPF 2019 for exceptional houses in the countryside. The first to be awarded by a planning committee in Cambridgeshire.

The essential concept was for a single monolithic and sculptural form sited within the natural wetland landscape with references to the Villa Rotunda by Andrea Palladio and the landscape sculptures by Richard Serra. The building is enclosed in Corten steel rainscreen cladding with concealed fixings when the patination process will fuse the panels together creating the appearance of the building being milled out of a single ingot of steel.

Photography: Nick Guttridge: nickguttridge.com