I spent the day in Hastings, visiting the Hastings House, a project by Hugh Strange which has been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize.

There is a risk that it will be overlooked as so small scale in favour of bigger and more lumpen projects; but if architecture is about quality of thought on a small scale and the craft of execution, then Hastings House definitely deserves its place on the list.

It’s a set of extensions to a late Victorian terrace house on West Hill in Hastings: from outside nondescript; but one walks through the Victorian hallway into a much larger, modern kitchen-dining room at the back which looks out onto the steep terracing behind the house, to which two additional rooms have been added, making for a geometrically complicated and interesting outlook, a piece of urban bricolage:-

Everything is very carefully and meticulously detailed:-

This is actually much closer to most people’s experience of architecture than the projects juries usually choose.