Chapel House - Mark Wray Architects

The country lane leading those to Chapel House offers nothing.

Thick hedgerows. Weathered tarmac. The bovine curiosity of neighbouring cattle leaning over whatever fence is nearest, indifferent to the significance of what stands behind it.

That is, perhaps, the point.

Chapel House and the North Wraxall Congregational Chapel were built circa 1862. Coursed rubble stone. Slate roofs. Coped gables. Two ecclesiastical buildings on an unusually isolated site in Wiltshire, midway between North and Upper Wraxall. Described by Historic England as unaltered. For over a century they remained exactly that. The chapel performed its function. The manse stood beside it in quiet solidarity. Two structures parted by a few feet. Each entirely itself. Each belonging to the other without agreement.

Mark Wray Architects is a Bath-based practice with a specific and deliberate purpose - the reimagining of listed historic buildings. The kind of work that asks more of its practitioner than the building asks of its occupants. In 2020, Sheena and Paul Murphy arrived at Chapel House. Sheena, the founder of interior design studio Nune. Paul, a start-up founder. They were mid-renovation in London when Paul sent the listing. She thought he was joking. They went to see it. Little time followed before they became owners of Chapel House. Four years of considered, ecologically conscious renovation followed.

The site sits one hundred metres from part of the Roman Fosse Way. The groundwork was conducted under the watch of an archaeologist. Below the chapel's foundations is history older than the building itself. The renovation required understanding this before touching anything above it.

A glass walkway now connects the chapel to a modern extension at the rear, clad in Siberian larch. The larch has silvered with time, a material that understands its relationship to what it accompanies. The rubble stone facade retains its integrity. The ashlar strips, the 12-pane sashes in flush surrounds, the coped gables. All of it precisely as it was. The building still reads, from the lane, exactly as it always did. The intervention does not announce. It clarifies.

Inside, the chapel's nave became the kitchen. The whole structure essentially came out and was put back in again. Bauwerk limewash on the bathroom walls. Herringbone Bejmat terracotta tiles underfoot. Zellige on the wall above marble skirting. Fixtures from Water Monopoly and Waterworks. The marble vanity designed by Nune, fabricated locally. A Paint and Paper Library palette throughout. Sheena's professional sensibility applied to her own home with the particular attention reserved for the things that matter most.

Re-insulation. Secondary glazing. Underfloor heating. New electrics. The invisible work. The kind that cannot be admired because it cannot be seen. Done because the building required it.

Outside, Marian Boswall has made the grounds speak in the same register as the home. Dry-stone walls. Specimen trees. A wildflower meadow. A naturally heated, chemical-free swimming pool. A treehouse by Treehouse Life. The garden does not perform. It settles into the landscape the chapel has occupied for over a century and adds its own quiet voice without insistence.

What remains with me about Chapel House is its softness.

Not as a quality applied to a hard subject. The Grade II listed rubble stone, the Roman archaeology beneath, the weight of a building that performed its function for over a hundred years but as what emerges when restraint is exercised with complete confidence.

The building's stoicism is intact. Its past is honoured. And yet you feel, standing inside it, the warmth of four years of careful, considered love applied to a structure that was ready to receive it.

Chapel House does not meet you at the lane. It does not offer itself from the facade. But the glass walkway, the silvered larch, the zellige tiles, the Marian Boswall wildflower meadow -each detail arrives when you are ready for it.

As if the home is deciding, at its own pace, how much of itself to share.

The cows remain curiously leaning over churchyard fences.

The hedgerows remain dense.

And a slender country lane remains as is.

Photography - Inigo