Five Tile-Clad Towers Forge a Fantastical Home Inspired by Hop Kilns

With its cluster of roundel towers and conical roofs, this countryside home for a family of four in Kent evokes the local vernacular of 18th-century oast houses—buildings once used for drying hops in beer brewing—but its design and construction are anything but traditional.

“The clients were very open to pushing the boundaries of designing an innovative house,” says project architect Lucy Moroney of ACME, the London-based firm behind the home, dubbed Bumpers Oast.

Though similar in form and built with local trades, Bumpers Oast deviates from traditional structures with a new material palette and construction methods, including prefabrication, that helped the home achieve passive house standards of airtightness. The use of a heavily insulated timber frame, instead of the brick walls traditionally used for hop kilns, was key in achieving Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4.