For much of its 100-plus years, the double-height brick structure that became Sandy Suffield’s home in the English town of Bury St. Edmunds was a building without a purpose. It was constructed as an engine house in the early 1900s to provide electricity for an upper-class family, but the manor they lived in burned to the ground just a few years later. “I bought the property in 2014, exactly a hundred years after the fire,” says Sandy, a creative director who has worked internationally for Apple, Pentagram, and Time Out. “It was pretty much left alone.”

Pretty much, yes, although old-timers speak of its having been used as a forge, and Sandy found its whitewashed brick walls covered with pencil calculations relating to what appears to have been a greengrocer business. It was this sense of history that made her fall in love with the raw space, along with its perfectly pitched roof, which allows for a cathedral ceiling crisscrossed with timber beams.

Sandy saw potential and called on friend and designer Michael Corsar for a second opinion. “It was a beautifully made building with precise Victorian detailing,” Corsar recalls, citing the brick courses over the doors and window arches. “But I said, ‘You can’t keep it the way it is, you need to insulate it.’ The inner leaf was really rough.”

After convincing her to add insulation, Corsar worked with Sandy to put in new interior brick walls in a “higgledy” layout that replicates the look of the original rough brickwork—sans grocers’ notes.

But Corsar’s most drastic change was to more than double the amount of space, from about 555 square feet to about 1,250, by adding a sleeping loft and a new wing for a pair of guest rooms and bathrooms. Today, the original footprint contains the kitchen/dining area and a sunken lounge. A simple staircase and a flush, push-to-open panel—Sandy calls it her “James Bond door”—knit together new and old.

Sandy’s farflung tastes and eye for vintage furniture are reflected throughout. An inexpensive antique table is paired with Habitat chairs from her childhood home atop reclaimed Victorian tiling in the dining area. “I wanted to use old things as much as possible, both as an aesthetic choice and out of reluctance to contribute more stuff to a landfill,” she says. Bright prints and paintings by friends and family decorate the deliberately plain walls. “I’m such a magpie,” Sandy says. “The white walls are necessary, so I can see all I have collected.”

Today, she is in awe of the gallery-like space she’s created within the formerly idle building. “The light, the brickwork—it’s all stupidly beautiful,” she says. “It was just exciting to breathe life back into it.”

Project Credits:

Designer: Michael Corsar

General Contracting: Seamans Building

Structural Engineering: Rennie Park Associates

Cabinetry: Deben Joinery

Appears In

Before & After: A Brick Engine House Becomes an Airy Abode in England