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Private Museum

• Dorset, United Kingdom

  The brief required a new building to house a world class collection of Chinese porcelain. The constrained budget lead to the concept for the building that we dubbed the Storehouse.

  We proposed suppressing any external expression of its museological function adding an apparently commonplace barn to the existing outbuildings and by doing so greatly augmenting the experience and surprise of discovering the treasure store within.

• The sketch model illustrates the concept – a series of discreet alcoves for individual collections encircling a main vaulted nave containing a large collector’s study table holding books and items offered up for study.

  The ‘blind’ building was located anonymously among 19th century outbuildings (the whole site was listed) with its entrance through an existing barn.

• The ‘Storehouse’, casts a familiar silhouette but is conspicuously restrained and initially conceived as clad in charred timber to be black like many local traditional barns.

  For security and drama it has no evident means of entry, no doors, no obvious architectural signs.

• The building is designed to be cheap to build and cheap to run.

  Its walls are constructed of self-insulating terracotta blocks, its structure of industrial steel and extremely low-cost timber trusses used by volume house-builders.

  An air borne heat-exchange system powers the under-floor heating at minimal cost and the power load for lighting is reduced by the large skylight and the universal use of fluorescent lighting.

• Six hundred small objects are exhibited in clearly compartmented rooms dedicated to specific collections. Each alcove was designed to play on a theme of curves, with secretly fixed glass shelves and felt covered dados.

  The central space with its eight distinct cabinets provide showcases for the most prized pieces.

  The difficult problem of lighting so many small objects without casting distracting shadows was solved by illuminating the objects through diffusing fabric ceiling panels.

• Entry is through the adjacent barn, now the ante-chamber to the museum.

  Once inside, the museum opens up on axis, a great timber lined nave, like an upturned boat, its skylights illuminating the nave and en-circled by the eight alcoves containing row upon row of fine pieces of china each with their own story and their own place in the collector’s mind.

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