Businesses are born out of all sorts of motivations.

There’s the desire to use a skill you’ve trained darned hard to achieve; the knowledge you have a ground-breaking concept that the world really and truly needs; or, let’s face it, pure and unadulterated, cold hard cash.

And then there are the more quirky – the ones where you find yourself asking ‘what on earth made them think that was a good idea’?

If you’d seen Natalie Roberts and her husband Steve only a year or so ago, you might indeed have been asking that very question of them.

After all, this is a couple who came to Suffolk on an overnight stay for a Christmas Market, and pretty much walked away with the keys to a dilapidated windmill that hadn’t been touched in almost a century.

This project is a conversion of a former windmill structure located in the heart of Suffolk. The structure is a mill stump constructed of brick and suffering from loss of its sails and cap decades before. The design replaces the cap with a contemporary zinc pod installation but based on the traditional ‘inverted boat’ form exploiting the stunning views over the Suffolk countryside and provides a fantastic living space for its visitors. The structure offers its own challenges of planning and design where no internal lines offer a straight edge making the circulation strategy and use of each space an interesting prospect.

Professional Builder reports on a stunning windmill conversion using Kerto LVL Engineered Timber Solutions for Roof Systems.

Cockfield Windmill, situated in the heart of the Suffolk countryside, was a former windmill structure recently converted to accommodation for holiday lets. Before it was converted, the structure was just a mill stump constructed of brick with a traditional tar coating which no longer had its sails or cap.

Beech Architects were the architects involved in this interesting, yet challenging project, where the client wanted a new cap based on the traditional ‘inverted boat’ form, exploiting the stunning views over the Suffolk countryside.