DSDHA took cues from one of Henry Moore’s own creative obsessions when extending the Sheep Field Barn in the grounds of the late artist’s Hertfordshire home: the relationship between internal and external forms. The architecture studio (which also designed this Clapham House) has wrapped an existing structure – adapted by Hawkins\Brown in 1999 – in a protective new outer shell, just like the monumental bronze sculpture that stands beside it: Moore’s 1981 Large Upright Internal / External Form, in which one form cradles another.
It’s a simple but effective way to enlarge the existing structure while improving its energy performance. DSDHA’s oversized shell has doubled the building’s footprint and improved its thermal efficiency while enabling it to be reimagined as a space for exhibitions, learning and making. It reopens to the public within the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens on 1 April 2026, a month before a major exhibition of Moore’s work at Kew Gardens.
Tour the new Henry Moore Studios & Gardens extension by DSDHA
The solid timber structure is clad in reclaimed silver spruce and internally, by the building’s own repurposed panels made from Douglas fir. Moore himself would have approved. The titan of British sculpture was also a proponent of retrofit and reuse – he re-erected a defunct 16th-century barn bought from a local farm in the grounds of his home as an exhibition space for his tapestries. 'We were responding to what he called “elegant frugality”,’ says DSDHA founding director David Hills, describing it as a ‘modest’ intervention in the landscape.
The cladding and large openings also restore the agricultural quality of the original building – once a steel-framed barn used for storage by Moore, before its 1999 adaptation – while new glazing opens it up to the landscape. 'We wanted something that spoke to the rural vernacular,' says Lesley Wake, chief operating officer at the Henry Moore Foundation.
Henry Moore’s 1981 Large Upright Internal / External Form stands beside the newly extended barn
Sheep Field Barn’s double-height exhibition space now tells the complete story of Moore’s life and work from 1922 to 1984, while making sense of the disparate studios peppered around the grounds for maquette-making, etching and carving, for example. In this cache of highlights from the Henry Moore Foundation Collection, we see nascent ideas become fully fledged fixations, such as his reclining figures and mother-and-child sculptures, and chart the trajectory of a sketch becoming a model and a monumental organic form.
It’s also a place to see him cement his own relationship with architecture, from his first major public sculpture – the 1928 West Wind, a stone relief commissioned for the façade of London Underground’s HQ in St James’ Park – to his colossal bronze Mirror Knife Edge installation for IM Pei’s extension to Washington DC’s National Gallery, made in 1977.
A timber staircase leads up to a smaller gallery for temporary exhibitions, currently showing Moore’s Shelter Drawings – moving sketches of London residents taking refuge in the Underground from the Blitz during the Second World War. These haunting, intimate works showing the human experience of war – drawn from memory – gave Moore his first fame.
For the first time, people of all ages can now make their own sculptures on the site where Moore made many of his greatest works, taking advantage of the foundation’s education programme. The building’s enlarged shell creates space for two studios – one for messy making and one ‘dry’ space for learning, replacing a single classroom-style area previously available to education groups.
Henry Moore in his maquette studio (1968)
DSDHA – which has designed a number of early-years centres and schools over the years – took design inspiration for the studios from the way children interact with Moore’s sculptures across the grounds. 'Children literally inhabit the art,' says Deborah Saunt, the other DSDHA founding director, pointing to the bronze Large Figure in a Shelter, 1985, whose patina has changed over the years thanks to the touch of small hands.
'They don’t see any threshold between indoor, outdoor and the art itself. This is a haptic place.' The studios and lunch area – insulated with sheep’s wool – have a tactile, natural palette of timber and cork, and there are no changes in levels between indoors and out. Meanwhile, large windows frame views of sculptures in the grounds, so that the next generation of sculptors can gaze at Moore’s work while experimenting with form and material.
