House of EM Debuts with a Stepped Danish Brick House on a Plateau Above the River Teme near Ludlow

Skylark House is the first completed building by House of EM, the London practice founded by Emma Bodie and Matthew Sanders after years as directors at Michaelis Boyd. A first project tells you what a studio actually cares about. This one sits on a once overgrown plateau above the River Teme, on the edge of Ludlow in Shropshire. It is a 383 m² family home for developers James and Sam Charters and their two children, with a brief that asked for mid-century influence without nostalgia.

What interests us is the discipline. The palette is brick, chestnut, concrete and lime plaster, and nothing else is allowed to compete. The upper floor steps back to reduce the house's apparent bulk, and the plan is organised around a central courtyard and views to the river. A single detail, a castellated brick band, does the work that a lesser house would hand to five different materials. That restraint is easy to claim and hard to deliver, and here it mostly holds.

A Plateau Above the Teme

The aerial view explains the site better than any description. Dense woodland closes in on three sides, the roofline stays flat and low, and a church tower in the distance reminds you that Ludlow, a historic market town, is close by. The house treats the plateau as a clearing rather than a stage, and stepping the upper floor keeps it from reading as a single two-storey slab against the trees.

The chimney stack is the one vertical gesture the architects allow themselves, and it earns its place. At dusk it anchors the composition above the grassy slope and weathered steel steps, giving the house a domestic signal that flat-roofed modernism often forgets. The landscape plan, with around 2,000 bulbs, new trees and pollinator-friendly planting, suggests the clearing will soften considerably within a few seasons.

Long Brick, Fine Courses

The elongated Danish brick is the project's central decision. Laid in fine horizontal courses, it stretches the walls visually and pulls the eye along the length of the house, which helps a two-storey volume sit lower in the land. The pale tone reads warm in overcast Shropshire light rather than clinical, and the dark window frames give the elevations a crisp edge.

It is worth being honest about the material. This brick is imported, not local, which sits uneasily next to the practice's rooted-in-place language. The justification is in the result: no local brick would deliver this proportion or this calm. You can disagree with the trade-off, but the decision was clearly deliberate, and the gravel gardens of verbena and grasses beside the walls make the brick look lived with rather than simply placed.

Castellation as a Thread

Outside, castellated brick banding wraps the window heads in a strict vertical rhythm, and ribbed concrete canopies cap the tall glazing on the tower corner. It is a small move that gives the elevations a cornice-like finish without any applied ornament. The brick itself becomes the decoration.

The smart part is that the motif comes inside. The built-in dining banquette repeats the castellated profile, so the detail you noticed on the approach turns up again where you sit down to eat. This is what detailing from the inside out looks like in practice: one idea carried across scales until it feels inevitable. Clustered globe pendants and a window onto foliage keep the nook from tipping into heaviness.

Arrival and the Floating Stair

The approach is understated: concrete steps rise from a gravel court with a clipped pine and boulders to a timber-framed glass door. There is no grand porch, just a clear threshold. Inside, the hallway sets out the interior language immediately, with timber ceiling beams overhead and a concrete stair that appears to float.

The stair is the most sculptural element in the house, and the hall gives it room. A wooden bench and a large painting make the space somewhere to pause rather than a corridor, which is a generous use of floor area in a four-bedroom home.

Chestnut, Concrete and the Hearth

Locally sourced chestnut forms the beamed ceiling over the open-plan kitchen and living space, and polished concrete runs underfoot. The pairing works environmentally as well as visually: the concrete acts as thermal mass, holding warmth in winter and moderating heat in summer. Dark veined marble on the kitchen and in the bathroom adds the one note of richness the palette needs.

The living room centres on a brick chimney and wood stove set between corner windows, with trees filling the frames on either side. A timber window seat looks out to a sculpted pine and the brick wings beyond, letting you read the house from within it. These are the moments where the mid-century influence feels most sincere: low furniture, built-in comfort, and floor-to-ceiling glazing that pulls the wooded garden into the room.

Plans and Drawings

Published descriptions call the plan F-shaped; the drawings read closer to a T, with a bedroom wing and a separate roofed element extending the arms. Either way, the logic is clear. The ground floor gathers kitchen, dining, snug and entrance hall around the stair, while the first floor arranges bedrooms, dressing room and bathrooms tightly above. The roof plan shows a central rooflight and the stepped stair volume, confirming how the upper level pulls back from the ground floor footprint.

The elevations show how much the site shapes the building. The south elevation perches the house on a steep embankment above a falling grove of trees, while the east and west drawings emphasise the deep flat roof overhang, the tall chimney and the glazed ground floor.

Why This Project Matters

Debut projects often overreach, trying to prove range. Skylark House does the opposite. House of EM picks four materials, one recurring detail and a clear plan, and lets texture and proportion carry the house. For a young practice, that is a confident statement about the kind of work it intends to make.

It also offers a useful model for rural new-builds in England. Rather than borrowing barn or cottage imagery, it takes the clarity of mid-century modernism and grounds it with chestnut from nearby, thermal mass in the floors and a landscape plan built for pollinators. You can question the imported brick, but the house argues persuasively that rootedness comes from attention to site and detail as much as from where every material was made.

Skylark House by House of EM (Emma Bodie and Matthew Sanders), Ludlow, Shropshire, United Kingdom. Area: 383 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Richard Gaston.

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