A Private View: opposites attract in a 17th-century timber-framed house in Suffolk

People can be surprising. And Giles Miller, who with his wife, Sarah-Jane, has built an exquisite contemporary holiday house by the sea in Kent, is one such person. Woven House – all crystal-clear glass and cantilevers – is, of course, not the house we’re here to talk about, however. Rather, we’re interested in one with a few more winters behind it, shall we say, “without a single straight line anywhere,” Giles remarks. It’s 300 years old and beautiful and crooked – and certainly not the house one would expect the creators of a contemporary masterpiece to live in.

But for Giles – an artist and architect with his own category-defying sculptural design studio, which Sarah-Jane runs with him – that dichotomy is what it’s all about. In fact, he thrives on it. “Contrast creates impact,” he says plainly, sitting in front of a marching row of timber joists. They’re almost parallel, but not quite. “And there’s a beauty in contrast too. Lots of my work is about balance and duality – of the interplay between materials and light, and about mixing things that you might not naturally put together.” There’s no reason we can’t live like this too, he suggests.

And yet, for all that, Giles also insists that the two buildings aren’t so very different after all. Despite being centuries (and miles) apart, there is – as he explains – a pleasing “circularity” to them both that absorbs frantic family life well. And so it’s with sadness, then, that he and Sarah-Jane are putting the house on the market, bidding goodbye to this place in search of pastures – and contrasts – new.

“Our Kent project was planned as a holiday home – an escape from urban life – but I never thought we’d actually ever leave London. Our studio was in Deptford, near where we lived, and our life was there. But then Covid came along and everything changed – including our studio. We realised the team didn’t need to be in one place all the time. We’ve got family in Suffolk, so we took the plunge in 2021 – and ended up in this incredibly old, on-the-wonk house, which is just beautiful.

“We still collaborate on ideas as a team, but most of our sculptural artworks and design pieces are concepts, which we then charge production teams and fabricators with making – often locally; at the moment, I’m working on something in Mumbai, which will be made there. I go into London about once a month, but otherwise I busy myself in my little workshop in the garden. As an artist, that change has been wonderful – I’m totally immersed in my practice and get to just enjoy the process of it.

“Buying an old place wasn’t necessarily a must-have for us, but I’ve always been interested in historic architecture, despite what you might think, looking at Woven House. I feel quite nostalgic about heritage architecture. This building was great, as it had the age, but it didn’t require too much work – we just had to bring it back to life, as it had been empty for three years.

“The difference between this house and our project in Kent is immense. Woven House is almost entirely glazed and feels very open, whereas this place is more solid and cosy, and they encourage different modes of living as a consequence – not least as Woven is a holiday house. They are, however, both places to retreat to, albeit in different ways. I love the contrast between them, which you always feel more keenly when you move between the two.

“What I find interesting is that, despite being polar opposites, there are also great similarities between the two. We designed Woven’s floorplan to be open and circular – a series of zones rather than rooms. And, oddly enough, this house has something similar going on. There are two staircases at either end, which are connected top and bottom and which are both in constant use. As a result, there are no little cul-de-sacs or useless corners; instead there’s a fluid circularity to the layout here that feels in the same vein. It can play to your disadvantage, however, when you’re trying to find things… Or children.

“There’s a creative legacy in this house that I find quite poignant. A Welsh painter named Glyn Morgan was the last person to live here; he spent the last 20 years of his life in this house. He painted in a huge studio outside – it was so big it took up the whole garden, which was why we rebuilt a smaller one. I’d always been desperate to find one of his paintings in the attic – no luck. Until, that is, we were knocking his old studio down. Tucked behind one of the walls was a nude from the 1950s. It was a bit of a state, but I trimmed it and reframed it. I love that, with that painting, we’ll be able to take a bit of this house with us when we go.

“That picture is one of a real mix of things we have here: little Ai Weiwei works, Matisse prints, mid-century furniture, all of which I imagine some people might think are at odds with the age of the house. I think it works. I like the idea of the balance of opposing forces in a unified form. Not only does one exaggerate the other, it almost celebrates it.

“I love texture too – and in a building like this you’ve got texture everywhere: the beams, the plaster, the shadows, the wattle and daub of the ancient walls. My work is all about tactility, composing materials to something almost like a mathematical matrix. Working on such things here – in a house where there isn’t a single straight line – is really interesting to me. But there’s also an organic quality to the things I design – a fluidity that feels of the natural world. I get that same feeling here, not least as – being out of the city – I feel much closer to nature here. It has been fascinating feeling how this house has fed my work.

“Sarah-Jane is concentrating hard on Woven at the moment, with a plan to turn it into a place for retreats, while I’m focusing on our studio work. Ultimately, though, I need more room in my workshop. And we’d like to be nearer the Suffolk coast. If I could pick the house up, though, and move it to the seaside, with bit more studio space, I’d do it in a flash. That would actually be pretty perfect.”

Further reading

Giles Miller Studio

Giles Miller Studio on Instagram

Sarah-Jane and Giles Miller on their contemporary home beneath a canopy of trees in Broadstairs, Kent