Architect Sarah Featherstone on the remarkable ways buildings are shaped by the people who inhabit them
Sarah Featherstone is a RIBA award-winning architect, co-founder of practice Featherstone Young, and lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She’s also the latest guest to feature on The Modern House Podcast. We’re particularly drawn to Sarah’s way of thinking, for when it comes to architecture, she is less interested in bricks and mortar and more in the way in which people inhabit spaces. Listen to the episode here.
Sarah can practically pinpoint the moment she started to think about architecture. When she was at school, the parents of two friends commissioned architects to design and build contemporary homes for them, which were unlike anything the young Sarah had come across growing up in the countryside of Dorset. She gravitated towards one of them in particular for its surprising and flexible design. Visiting this house as a child has certainly shaped her taste: even today, Sarah gets a buzz when buildings are more than first meets the eye.
Her own work, however, at the practice she helms with her work and life partner, Jeremy Young, is informed by environment. One of their most celebrated projects, for instance, is the multi-award winning Ty Hedfan in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Built around its beautiful surroundings, the name translates to mean ‘hovering house’, which is fitting, given how its body seems to float above the stream below. But Sarah is also interested in a kind of sustainability that we don’t often hear about. “I think social sustainability is really important, which is how people behave. When you’re designing homes, it’s not just about the ways you can super-insulate and make them energy-efficient, but about how people are going to use them and what they are going to feel like.”
“I like the idea that you don’t over-design a building. There is space for people to make it their own and use it in ways that you might not imagine,” she tells our host and co-founder Matt Gibberd. Her top three living spaces, then, do exactly that. Listen to the episode now to hear her choices and her experiences with them, why she loves surprising buildings and her unlikely encounter with Right Said Fred. And, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. As always, happy listening!
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