Architecture studio Tonkin Liu has converted a barn in the English county of Yorkshire into a house featuring a double-height library and a gallery space flanked at either end by huge windows.
The design of the house was led by the qualities of the site in the village of Great Ouseburn and the property was transformed into a three-bedroom house with the library and gallery space at its heart.

The studio headed by Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, designed the house for the parents of one of its staff, Greg Storrar, who took on the role as project architect.
"An existing agricultural shed on the site ? once a container for tools and tractors ? is now a container for a lifetime collection of books and art," explained Storrar on behalf of the studio, which decided to retain and enlarge the original building's steel frame and ground slab.
The property's form and materials help to evoke the character of the old barn. New cladding consisting of galvanised-steel fins combined with shot-blasted timber is intended to echo the bark of the silver birch trees surrounding the house.
A pathway between the trees aligns with a pair of tall, glazed openings that allow a view straight through the building. The windows also frame views of the rising and setting sun from within a long gallery on an east-west oriented axis.

The house's internal layout features a collection of interconnected spaces with varied proportions. At the centre is a double-height library that looks out onto the gar...