Jobe Burns, widely recognised for co-founding the homeware label Concrete Objects with Samuel Ross in 2017, has taken on an entirely different creative challenge—reviving a 300-year-old farmhouse in the English countryside. This restoration wasn’t planned. Rather, it came about through a chance encounter during his graduate show at Chelsea College of Art, where the property’s new owners approached him about the neglected site.
Using the farmhouse as an experimental studio space while finishing a sculpture degree at the Royal College of Art, Burns began a deeply immersive process of exploration. He treated the house not just as a project, but as a subject to study. During this period of observation, he made a striking discovery—a pair of hidden rooms concealed behind a cupboard.
“I took the cupboard down, removed the floor, knocked through the breeze blocks, and uncovered two hidden, brick-arched rooms,” he explained. “It was like the house had been holding something back, waiting for the right moment to be seen.” That moment became the core idea behind the entire renovation: to unearth the home’s authentic essence rather than impose a new vision.
Balancing Restoration With Imaginative Interventions
Throughout the space, Burns favoured gentle interventions over dramatic reinventions. He brought back tactile features like soft curves, lending the interiors a sense of continuity and physical warmth. Transitioning from room to room, subtle shifts in materials and colour palettes guide the experience. Off-white kitchen walls open into terracotta-toned bathrooms, marking each space with quiet intention.
Many of the original elements have been restored and celebrated, while others found new lives in different forms. Old roof tiles now frame the fireplace, and dead trees from the property have been reborn as furniture. These gestures, both practical and poetic, reflect Burns’ respect for the site’s natural and historical layers.
Contemporary pieces were chosen with similar care. The living room features a Tubular Chair by Andu Masebo, harmonised with a table designed by Burns himself under his label Orbe. Every addition, although modern, complements the farmhouse’s grounded spirit without dominating it.
A Human-Centred Design Philosophy Anchors the Work
Although Burns is known for crossing creative disciplines—his past work includes signage, furniture, and small-scale objects—this farmhouse project reveals a consistent thread: a deep sensitivity to context. The space may not immediately signal his signature, but upon closer inspection, his humanist approach becomes clear.
“You choose the building to adapt your behaviour to it – it’s a shift from the external world,” he shared. “This farmhouse draws you back into a time when things were slower, and gives you more time to let thoughts linger. The architecture holds a kind of stillness, a patience, and, in turn, it asks the same of you.”
Burns’ restoration offers more than aesthetic beauty; it invites occupants to reconnect with a slower, more intentional rhythm of life. By allowing the house to reveal itself, he has breathed new vitality into an age-old structure—one that, in return, reshapes the way people live within it.