The stone base of a former mill has been repurposed as a raised plinth for house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, designed by TAP Architects.
Dug into a gently sloping site, the granite mill building was once surrounded by a variety of agricultural structures.

The new home ? called The Larch Mill on account of its black Siberian larch cladding ? is designed to reference this history.
Its owners initially wanted to incorporate the ruined mill into the home itself,  but flood risk in the area restricted any new building to the higher portion of the site.

To solve this, TAP Architects used the old mill's stone walls as a base.
"By removing the roof of the mill we were able to conceive of the base of the building as a plinth for the new construction above, thus treating it as part of the site topography - the built equivalent to a rock outcrop," said the studio.
This stone base houses storage and a plant room with a separate entrance.
An exterior staircase leads up to an L-shaped area housing the living spaces, accessed from the higher plateau.

"We developed a proposal that organised the house into two parallel bays," said TAP Architects.
"The first appears as a linear structure with half its length on the solid ground of the plateau and the other projects out of the granite walls of the mill."

In order to build atop this stone base, a lightweight structure of steel and timber was used.
The wing at the top of the slope is built upon new concrete f...