Luxurious Four-Bedroom Retreat With Roman Stone Bath House Wins Architectural Praise

The house has been described as the most accomplished private residence completed in Britain this year. Its clients prefer to describe it as a place where they actually want to spend time.

The building is organised around a central bathhouse — a sequence of spaces for hot immersion, cold plunge, steam and rest, built from Travertine limestone and handmade tile — that draws on ancient Roman thermal bathing traditions.

“The Romans understood something we have largely forgotten,” says the architect. “That bathing is not hygiene. It is ritual. It separates the part of the day that is work from the part that is life.”