Reimagining your home: extending historic buildings

Even modest enlargements can transform a house, changing circulation, creating new living spaces and improving appearances. They can also be an essential means of keeping historic buildings alive.

1. Bindon Mill, Dorset

This extension to a historic mill in Dorset creates a beautiful living room in complete contrast to the more intimate interiors of the restored house. Its large windows offer magnificent views over the mill pool and surrounding countryside. The restoration of the mill was undertaken by Ken Morgan of Morgan Carey Architects, Wareham

2. Spains Hall, Essex

A new porch entrance with Tuscan columns by Kay Pilsbury of Kay Pilsbury Thomas Architects of Saffron Walden has turned the back door of this large Essex house into a proper entrance. It provides direct access to the kitchen and private living rooms of the family

3. Farmhouse, Dorset

A tiled extension to a thatched farmhouse near Sherborne, Dorset. It requires great tact to extend a smaller house without overwhelming or compromising its character. The extension, designed by Stuart Martin Architects and including a drawing room, kitchen and bedroom, incorporates slightly larger rooms than those of the original cottage. The planners requested that it be tiled

4. Barn conversion, Kent

After a poor conversion in the 1980s, Thomas Croft Architects received permission to strip this former Grade II-listed barn in Kent back to its historic frame. The new kitchen extension, which is timber-framed, is in the idiom of the original building and opens out to the garden

5.

Manor house, Hampshire

A dining-room extension to this Hampshire manor house by George Saumarez Smith of ADAM Architecture gives a visual focus to this garden frontage. Its Portland-stone façade, articulated with pilasters and incised carving, forms an attractive contrast to the warm colour of the 17th- century brickwork

6. Sandridge Park, Devon

This conservatory, attached to a regency villa in Devon, replaces a lost predecessor. Designed by Mark Watson of the Bath firm of Watson, Bertram & Fell, it stylishly reworks the forms and detailing in a Modernist idiom

7. Beckside House, Lancashire

A handsome 18th-century house in Lancashire extended with a new library wing designed by Michael Bottomley of Haigh Architects, Kendal, Cumbria. The wing was completed in 1998, since when a matching wing has been added to the other side of the house