A new build house in rural Dorset for a London gallerist and family. The house sits on the crest of a hill, overlooking the Cranborne Chase, and takes advantage of spectacular views. In naming The Red House we sought to unashamedly tie this new construction to a story about English domestic architecture that stretches back to Hermann Muthesius’ 1904 ‘Das englische Haus’ and beyond. Muthesius called Philip Webb’s 1860 Red House in Bexleyheath, ‘the very first example in the history of the modern house.’ It was both pre-occupied with vernacular traditions of house-building but also in unifying the plan and use of the house through ‘material, colour and mass’. From a distance, the new Red House is true to type, a solid brick chimneyed affair under a pitched roof much as a child might draw. On closer inspection, many of those house signifiers are further exaggerated – the green eaves are excessively broad, the bay windows too numerous and the red brickwork used decoratively at a super-graphic scale. On entering, the ground floor reveals itself to be a single enfilade of spaces without doors, each separated by pairs of storerooms. Each space enjoys a specific relationship to its garden setting and landscape views. Nonetheless, with a nod to the Smithsons’ 1990’s Put-Away House, the organisation and self-presentation of the house reflects the clients’ interest in precision storage and society’s present day preoccupation with the accumulation of consumer products. Like many architects starting out, houses were some of the first commissions we received. In 2022, the practice will be fifteen years old and despite working on larger civic projects today, houses remain an important part of our work. The Red House is the fourth in a series of rural houses the practice has completed. This allows us the opportunity to trace our thinking about how we live today through built form whilst providing a testing ground for ideas that will be realised at different scales in other projects.