Client stories | A different approach to downsizing
Downsizing tends to arrive with a certain predictability. Often, a much-loved family home is sold, the heirloom dining room table is passed down to one of the children, and life shifts into something smaller and simpler – a different kind of bricks and mortar.
In some ways, our clients, John and Marjorie Milbank, fit this narrative. In others, they do not.
In their eighties, they found themselves in a position familiar to many: a substantial house, generous gardens, and the question of what comes next. But rather than compromise, they chose to create something themselves - right in their back garden.
Planning
Their starting point was a 1960s piggery barn sitting within their grounds - solid, practical, and full of potential. Their initial intention was to convert it, but as so often happens, planning changed their plans.
By the time permission came through in 2024, the rules had shifted. What had been a conversion became an opportunity to start again.
“The new rules would allow us to knock the barn down, move the footprint and have two storeys. We said, oh, that’s what we really want,” Marjorie recalls.
With architect Julian D Hood, the brief evolved into a contemporary black barn, drawing on the Suffolk vernacular without slipping into pastiche. A pitched roof, dark timber cladding, and a modern take on a traditional structure that sits comfortably in the landscape.
The build
Timber frame specialists Daniels & Vincent were brought in to construct the building from glulam (glued, laminated timber), and practicalities have been carefully threaded through the design. An air source heat pump, mechanical heat ventilation, and forward-thinking infrastructure - including full data cabling - all ensure the house will still make sense in 30 or 40 years’ time.
Inside, there’s an open plan living space well-suited for hosting as well as everyday life, balanced by a separate kitchen - a decision that Marjorie held onto with determination. A sculptural spiral staircase rises through the house, adding theatre and in total contrast to any stereotypical notion of “downsizing”.
Staying, but starting again
There is no concession here to age in the way you might expect. No ground-floor bedroom, no quiet retreat from stairs or structure, but instead, a sauna, a shower room, and life is continuing as it has, but in a more manageable way.
Their Victorian house - once a school, later a home - has played its part, and recently sold via through Strutt & Parker’s Suffolk branch. Five bedrooms, six reception rooms, and a setting that has hosted everything from everyday family life to a joint 80th birthday for 75 guests. They were, as John puts it, “only ever custodians”.
Perhaps the most telling detail is that they never really wanted to leave this corner of the countryside. They looked, of course - but finding something that offered both a manageable house and space for their horse proved elusive. More than that, there were friendships and routines that they didn’t want to leave behind.
Instead of moving away, they created a new house, set just beyond a hedge.