Five tile-clad towers make up this house in southeast England, designed by ACME as a modern interpretation of a hop-drying kiln.
Oast houses can be found all over the Kent countryside and today many of them are converted into homes. They would be built with pointed towers, so that hops harvested from the surrounding fields could be hung up to dry before being sent off to a brewery.

With Bumpers Oast, ACME uses the same form to create a contemporary family home featuring round rooms and high ceilings.
"It was an agricultural typology from the 15th century up to the 19th century," explained ACME director Friedrich Ludewig.
"We've tried to do something that is slightly better, that actually makes living in an oast more interesting," he told Dezeen. "It's a 21st century version of an oast house rather than a 19th century version."
In order to make the house suitable for modern family life, ACME had to break some of the usual rules of oast house construction.
Typically the towers would be built in a cluster, without any gaps in between. Ludewig's team realised they needed to introduce gaps, to integrate the living spaces with the surrounding garden.

"The issue that most of these oast houses have is that they have an incredibly binary relationship with the outside," said Ludewig.
"It would be really annoying to build an oast house that suffers from that issue again, a bit like a mediaeval castle, where you have to make this massi...