Court completed: a very sensitive addition to a fine early nineteenth century house combines Modernist refinement and transparency with respect for context.

The New Art Centre at Roche Court in Wiltshire is one of only a handful of sculpture parks in England. Works by Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Anthony Gormley, William Pye, Hubert Dalwood and others of similar stature are set in the rambling gardens and sweeping parkland to the south of the Regency house (built in 1804 for Nelson but never occupied by him). An old walled kitchen garden to the east has become the setting for stone tablets inscribed by letter cutters.

Art here is very much alive, working with the natural and manmade landscapes, buildings and changing seasons. As works come and go (for the Centre is fundamentally a business) the landscape and your perceptions of it are made to shift in subtle ways. In this magical process, architecture has played a part. Four years ago, a glass-fronted gallery for paintings and smaller sculptures was built against the wall of the kitchen garden, on the east side of the house (AR February 1999). Stepped up a slope from the house to a small orangery, which was designed by Munkenbeck & Marshall and completes a succession of structures that was previously only implied. The gallery is plainly a recent addition, but scale, proportion and austerity make it harmonize with its setting.

Steve Marshall has achieved another kind of harmony in the design of the most recent addition to Roche Court, a small house for visiting artists. As in the gallery, the vocabulary is austere: plain plastered walls, glass, wood and stone. But the scale is different. Partly inspired by Kettle's Yard in Cambridge*, the two-storey building behind the house, on its north side, responds to a more domestic context, to the scale of stable buildings and caretaker's cottage. At the same time, it asserts its own jewel-like clarity.

Visitors to Roche Court are free to wander and the artist's house was conceived as part of a promenade sculpturale through the grounds. Marshall and his client therefore gave the setting great attention. To the south, the house looks over a small and exquisite courtyard, set with sculpture and paved with pale limestone. At the centre is a magnolia. The eastern wall is formed by the caretaker's cottage, which Marshall has extended, almost invisibly, with reclaimed bricks.

On the north side Roche Court is backed up against a steep hill. Marshall has dug into the slope to create a small gravelled amphitheatre which aerates the collection of buildings at the back and shows the textural richness of different materials -- the old brick of kitchen garden and cottage against the flat rendered walls of the artist's house, a new retaining wall of local flint at the foot of the green bank, the gravel garden and piles of neatly stacked wood in the stable lean-to (a structure which Marshall has tidied up). To these are added the big slates recycled from Salisbury Cathedral which cover and tie together the artist's house and lean-to.

If you include symmetrical bays to east and west, and projecting cills (for sculpture) north and south, the plan is a perfect square. One bay contains the entrance to the curator's flat in the adjoining stable block, the other is a passageway from courtyard to amphitheatre sheltering front doors to the two houses on either side.

North and south faces of the building are also symmetrical but on the south the pattern of delicate verticals, floating horizontals and projections is more abstract, reminiscent of a Ben Nicholson. Here, the lower half of the building is inscribed with the exact outline of a corresponding opening in the north face. Off-centre, a glass cube projects through the panel holding a Hepworth sculpture and this in turn screens the bathroom within. Standing in the courtyard you can look through the upper opening to the skylight and imagine space as fluid, streaming in and out through the top of the building. Viewed from the back, the building is more transparent. From the top of the amphitheatre's steep grass bank you can see through the two upper horizontal openings to the luminous pale pink-washed wall of the main house.

Living quarters are on the piano nobile under the deep coved ceiling and skylight and are flooded with luminance from the frameless glazed openings on either side. Downstairs, the bedroom and bathroom are more enclosed and intimate. Marshall's stone bathroom fittings and unadorned furniture -- dining table, benches, cupboard and bed, all of oak -- have a quality that at times approaches the monumentalism of a Donald Judd sculpture. Workmanship and detailing is immaculate, and owes much to the dedication of Martin Price, the local contractor also responsible for building the gallery.

In its self-possession, Marshall's building has something in common with some of the more refined and aloof of Modernist houses such as Corbusier's Villa Savoie or the Tugendhat House by Mies. But whereas they tended to look as though they had just alighted in the suburban landscape, this one is very much alive to the buildings immediately around it, responding but also adding to the delight of the place.

* Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, housed in a series of cottages and an extension by Leslie Martin and others (AR January 1971), was founded by artist and curator Jim Ede (1895-1990). It is one of the most appealing of small art museums.

Architect

Munkenbeck + Marshall

Project team

Steve Marshall, Sam Coley, Stuart Cameron

Contractor

Martin Price

Photographs

Richard Bryant/Arcaid