Text description provided by the architects. The Norfolk Broads are an artificial landscape of outstanding natural beauty, a man made wetland sustained through human intervention of water pumping mills, dykes and canals. After hundreds of years of indus- trial use of the natural landscape, the recent decades have seen increasing emphasis on conservation and a managed retreat back to nature. The Hunsett Mill project was founded on similar principles, whereby careless piecemeal development, harmful to the immediate context and in conflict with local flood ecology was removed and replaced with an intervention that is contemporary in expression but deeply embedded in the local context. It is all but self sufficient in energy, water and waste, with an ac- tively positive effect on local ecology. The design considered its embodied energy and method of construction as well as its efficiency during occupa- tion. The environmental aims are directly embodied in the architectural concept to achieve a building that appears robust, pure and simple , with a clarity of space and consistency across scales and materialities.
