EXPERTISE:

The Practice has come to specialise in designing new houses in the country. A parallel interest has developed in the reordering of existing houses to make them more suitable as a background for the lives of their owners. The refurbishments include designs and colouring for the details of the interior and can be extended to the purchase of furniture, the design of carpets, textiles and all other aspects of the house and garden.

BACKGROUND:

After training as an architect at the Brighton College of Art and Crafts, Nicholas Hills prepared his European tour, working first in Greece with Aristotle Sakelarios, in Denmark with Professor Arne Jacobsen and in Finland with Professor Amo Ruusuvuori. Before setting up his own practice in 1973 he widened his experience with some notable architects in this country including Sir Hugh Casson, Dennis Lennon and Ove Arup.

Trained in the modernism of his era Nicholas Hills has nevertheless now embraced a vernacular architecture closely following a creative continuity of the Arts and Crafts tradition. The style can vary from county to county, but here in Norfolk it finds expression in an idiom which he refers to as Agricultural Mannerism. It owes something to the farm buildings of Samuel Wyatt, but in the interior planning and in the way natural light is contrived to enter the buildings something more to the work of Sir John Soane.