When it came to designing his own home, Richards had the freedom of a blank page. The brief was to create a new-build home for him and his family on a site at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by the woodlands and farmland of West Sussex. With creative freedom came the incorporation of seemingly disparate sources of inspiration, everything from the cinematic tactility of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Soviet art house hit, Stalker, to the classical plan of Andrea Palladio’s Renaissance masterpiece, Villa Barbaro, and Robert Mangolds 1970s minimalist work of geometric abstractions. The resulting building is one that plays with time, style and detail in surprising and unexpected ways, to appear as a “Roman ruin wrapped around a modern concrete house,” according to Richards.
