Architecture books analysing a single building all follow a well-trusted formula, right? Text by the architect about the development of the idea, add some lovely plans and sections, decorate the glossy pages with photographs from an architectural photographer like Iwan Baan, some other filler content to do with the engineering or similar, then get it out to sit on shelves to be barely looked at. This book, titled Here We Are, Home At Last, explores the architecture of Nithurst, a house designed by Adam Richards for his own family, does not follow this formula, it is no ordinary architecture book.


But Nithurst is not ordinary architecture. A detached and uniquely shaped house in the South Downs National Park, it is richly rooted in classical architectural theory from Andrea Palladio to John Vanbrugh, but Richards’ deep sources of inspiration veer away from architecture and include Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece of film making, Stalker, artworks from Nicholas Poussin to Paul Nash, and several more unexpected but poetic objects, images, and histories. It’s all brought together not as a normal biography of a building, but as a collection of fragments and reflections in what is less of an endeavour to explain the house, and more of an exercise in exploding it into rich new avenues of inquiry that only lead away from the property itself.

Instead of voicing the story himself, Richards has invited a range of writers to explore the building in their own personal ways. Takero Shimazaki, Jeremy Musson, Geoff Dyer, and Corinna Dean all offer rich texts that only occasionally describe Nithurst, instead looking through the architecture to discuss the references and ideas within it. In her text which weaves together many of the varied images throughout the book, Corinna Dean writes, “Nithurst is a repository for fragments that interplay with the architecture.” So too, is this book a repository of fragments, and it’s up to the reader to read, re-read, and create their own, distanced, understanding of the place.


The reader does learn about the building, though, even if it’s not in a traditional way. The staircase references Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death. Paul Nash’s 1932 watercolour Mansions of the Dead was inspiration for the grey brick pattern on the southern façade. A photograph of the Large Hadron Collider by Simon Norfolk is positioned to reflect a cosmological order in the plan. 17th century perspective drawings by Hans Vredeman de Vries influenced the external stepped rhythm and the sense of internal journey through the place. And the living room was designed with Tarkovsky’s sand-filled antechamber space from Stalker in mind.



Stalker was a reference point not only in the form and theory of the building, but also hugely informs the deeply considered, rich, and intelligent graphic design by Rosa Nussbaum. It is a layout and treatment of images and text that is masterful without being overly-serious. If Stalker was an influence for the movement through the spaces of Nithurst, then so it was for the movement through the pages of the book, often surprising with what is around the corner, always revealing a little more of the inhabited zone without allowing the visitor to fully know where they are.

Right at the end of the book, we do finally get shown the plans and elevations of Nithurst, the kind of documentation of place that would normally front-end such a publication. In a way, however, they seem a little redundant, because by this point the real meaning and architecture of the place is not in the description of diagram, but in the exploration of space and ideas – something that much architecture as well as publication and writing could learn from.