One daughter helps her parents realise a long-held ambition to build their own home
WORDS EMILY BROOKS PHOTOGRAPHY RICHARD CHIVERS/NICKY MYLIUS
As founders of the furniture design and manufacturing company Hitch Mylius, Hazel and Tristram Mylius have played an important role in the British design industry for more than 50 years. But they waited until after their retirement to fulfil one of their creative ambitions: building their own home. ‘All our married life we were looking for a plot of land, or a tumbledown shack needing love and refurbishment,’ says Hazel.
Having spent many holidays in Suffolk, they zoned in on the county and began looking for land in earnest in 2016. ‘I’d recently retired, so it seemed like the right time,’ says Tristram. They found a neglected 3-acre plot where a farmhouse had burned down several years before.
Wild and overgrown with many mature trees and far-reaching views, the plot offered tantalising glimpses of its past from the flint garden walls to an old orchard. Hazel and Tristram’s daughter, architect Nicky Mylius, was charged with creating a new home. ‘It was a dream to work in such an amazing place,’ she says. ‘Beneath everything, it was a very beautiful spot.’
As the site is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), Nicky’s design had to be sensitive to its surroundings, which includes several brick- and timber-built homes and converted farm properties close by. So the house has the simplicity of a rural building, but is resolutely contemporary. A standing-seam steel roof rises above the nearby brick properties and the glazing is dramatic, including the atrium-like entrance hall with a two-storey-high strip of glass that continues over the angled roof.
The three-storey portion of the house includes the bedrooms, while the open-plan kitchen, dining and living areas are in a connected single-storey pavilion. Where these structures meet a striking ribbon of glass runs up and around the perimeter.
Due to the sensitivity of the site, the planning process took around ten months, including a pre-application consultation, with work starting in late 2018. By early 2020 progress had fallen behind by at least six months, and further delays arose when Tristram and Hazel’s main contractor went bust just as the house was watertight. Undeterred, Nicky took up the reins and acted as project manager, persuading the contractor’s site manager and subcontractors to stay on and work directly for her. ‘I
