Box House

The Box House is Studio Bark’s flagship U-Build project, a two-storey home built on the first street at Graven Hill in Bicester – a pioneering development of 1,900 custom and self-build homes and a nationally significant project aiming to help the government double custom and self-build housing by 2020.

The brief was challenging: deliver a robust, affordable home for a client with limited construction experience, with the flexibility to convert from two to three bedrooms in future. The result is a large, light-filled house with a carefully detailed black timber cladding exterior, built largely by the clients themselves as a self-build project using our modular system, with structural and fabrication support from Structure Workshop and Cut and Construct.

The project stands as a proof of concept for how future housing could be delivered: through a distributed network of empowered end-users, supported by safe, effective and affordable assisted self-build solutions.

“A talented and dedicated team of young, ambitious architects who had the rare ability to understand exactly what we wanted from a home […] It was a pleasure to work with them and I would recommend them to anyone wanting something distinctive and beautiful whilst allowing an appreciation for all of your modern life demands.” Client, Box House

As featured on Grand Designs: The Streets

The Box House was selected as one of 10 pilot homes for Channel 4’s Grand Designs: The Streets (Season 1, Episode 4), airing on 25th April 2019. The episode is available to watch on Channel 4 on demand.

Read more about the Box House story on Studio Bark’s website.