Tarkovsky's dream: a country house made of brick and concrete

A house where nothing is as it seems. Architect Adam Richards used concrete, brick and his passion for movies to create a foolhardy farm where appearance and reality are close.

It was the gritty Soviet science fiction film "Stalker," of all things, that was the inspiration for a country house in tranquil West Sussex. "I know it's strange," says Adam Richards. But the architect is obsessed with Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece, about three men wandering through a post-apocalyptic no-go area. The place of longing in this wasteland is a space meant to make one's most fervent desires come true - if one doesn't die on the way there. "There are certain parallels to building a house," Richards says. "Namely: embarking on a journey to your inner self, to find a place in the world for yourself to arrive."

The sheep in front of the house obviously don't care. The sun shines down on them with almost Tuscan benevolence. The house sits in a hollow, yet strangely elevated, surrounded by the dense woods of the South Downs National Park. The fact that Adam Richards was allowed to build here at all is thanks to the National Park Authority, which approaches things "with more foresight" than the local planning authorities, as he politely puts it. It will have helped that Richards was responsible for a much-publicized museum expansion in the park in 2013. Nithurst Farm is what he's called the house where he now lives with his wife, Jessica, and their children together, Esme (9), Eddie (6) and Ivan (4).

Brick on the outside, concrete on the inside: Adam Richards' architecture appears historic and modern at the same time.

That the kitchen island used to be a pool table is only revealed by the slate overlay. The window behind it only hints at the landscape; the interplay of old pink curtain and gray concrete, as created by the formwork, is a reference to the painting "Saint Jerome in his study" by Hendrick van Steen-wyck the Younger.

Like a staircase, the architecture rises in a stepped movement from one story on the north to three stories on the south, the masonry interrupted here and there by seemingly random stacked round arches with deep reveals. The ornate facade, which cites neighboring 18th-century gatehouses, was laid by stonemasons rather than masons; the mortar is unusually thick, so you never know whether the bricks are particularly small or the joints particularly large. "I love these tiny inconsistencies," Richards says.

A narrow front door on the side leads into a narrow, dark vestibule, filled with the smell of freshly cut firewood. "It's a wake-up call for the senses," Richards says, because they have to be on full alert now.What follows is a light-filled room with a high ceiling that takes up almost the entire first floor. "I like the idea of this compression, which is then released into the open space." It is only here that it is revealed that the facade is literally just a facade. The actual house, made of structural concrete, is only encased by the thick brick skin. "Like a Romanesque ruin nestled around a modernist concrete house," Richards says. It's an anachronism in stone.

On the second floor, a stairway to heaven leads to bedrooms dedicated to Richards' late father.

Landlord Adam Richards composed the house from all sorts of references.

The first floor houses the kitchen, dining room and game room. "It was important to me that the kitchen become the centerpiece of the house and that the kids play here, too," says Jessica Richards, who conceived the house's floor plan with her husband. The exposed exposed concrete lends an almost Brutalist monumentality to the four-and-a-half-foot-high space, which, with its apses, resembles a nave. Six chapel-like concrete towers cut into the coffin-shaped floor plan, housing laundry and dressing rooms, studio and pantry. The space is modeled after a medieval hall. "We were very excited about how to translate that into the modern era," Richards says. And, without further ado, oriented the hall to a filming location from "Stalker": that hall that leads to the fabled "Room of Requirement." At least no rainwater drips from the ceiling here.

"The back of the facade is visible from the inside - as if an old ruin had been put over a modern house."

The sequence of bright, large rooms and small, darker passageways structures - loosely based on Tarkovsky - the entire house. A staircase opens to the living room, which offers views of nature through floor-to-ceiling windows: Richards' interpretation of the "Room of Desires," his idea of a perfect place. He himself speaks of "solar," a warming room in the medieval sense. Facing the street, he dispensed with windows and treated the wall like the "end of a cave," lining it with 300-year-old French tapestries in front of which he hung abstract prints by Robert Mangold. "We can't undermine the rules of physics like in the movies, but we can play with time, with the perception of spaces."

Again and again, the architecture creates stage-like productions. This is also the case with the stairway to the second floor, which leads across a theatrical gallery that overlooks the great hall. This is where the children's and guest rooms are located. Walls and ceilings are as the formwork created them, yet the interiors seem suffused with warmth: Richards complements the inevitable imperfections of the hard raw concrete with oiled pine floorboards, sisal rugs and brass hardware, plus: colorful furniture, tapestries and ceramics.

"We may not be able to defy the rules of physics, but we can certainly play with human perception."

Access to the bedroom on the top floor is through a double door between the children's bedrooms, which are arranged in axial symmetry on the left and right. When Richards opens it, the eye is first dazzled before a sun-soaked stairway to heaven rises in front of it. The architect built it as a reference to the movie "A Matter of Life and Death," about a pilot who is given a second chance at life after a crash. "My father was a pilot and died in a crash when I was young," Richards says. "I wanted this house that was built in his memory to also have a memorial to him."

Spiritual Journey: A Janus-faced Baroque sculpture directs visitors to the living room.

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