Experimental architecture isn’t always liveable architecture. That’s certainly true of the Pyramid House, a bold statement of future residential design built in 1981 as part of the developer-led ‘Homeworld 81’ exhibition in Milton Keynes. One of Britain’s most familiar new towns, Milton Keynes was incorporated in 1967 and laid out along modernist lines, with design and planning overseen by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. Homeworld was located in the town’s Bradwell Common district, one of 18 medieval villages swallowed up by the new town, and featured 36 ‘futuristic’ structures, all of which were displayed to the public as visitable show homes before being sold.
Step inside the experimental Pyramid House
The Pyramid House was one of the stars of this new suburb, one of many projects that focused on energy-saving and efficiency. Designed by Cardiff-based Wigley Fox Architects, it stood alongside the Container House, the Glass House, the Flexible House and the Computerised Home, as well as prefabricated designs from Canada and Scandinavia. It must all have been terribly unfamiliar to the average British homebuyer, with the pyramidal shape and unconventional floorplan adding a layer of exoticism.
‘It is a very, very strange building,’ admits architect Mark Bonshek of London-based studio Khan Bonshek. The Pyramid House survived the 1980s, 1990s and noughties largely unmolested, save for a spot on a reality TV decorating show that doubled down on its postmodern qualities. It was in this condition that the house found itself up for sale via The Modern House. The new owners approached several architects, ultimately appointing Khan Bonshek to update, refresh and overhaul what had become a rather mixed bag of style and layout.
‘You’re dealing with space in a completely different way. The project is like a massive loft; everything is triangular’
Sabba Khan
From the shingle-clad street façade with its inset garage and two entrances, the shallow slope of the pyramidal form stretches away to a point. Back in the 1980s, intrigued punters marched through the house, weaving in and out of the bedrooms and living spaces on the square floor plan before ascending the central spiral staircase to the upper level, beneath the pyramidal skylight at the apex. To accommodate this stream of visitors, the rooms on the main floor often had doors in and out, creating a confused and inefficient layout – the house was ‘designed for flow rather than as an actual house’, says Bonshek.
Other than some surface finishes and the addition of a new dormer at the rear, the layout remained largely unchanged. ‘We thought, we’ve got this very strange shape, so let’s try and play around with it,’ says Bonshek, and their scheme seeks to make the use of space more efficient while also giving Pyramid House a 21st-century low-energy upgrade.
‘The staircase is magical’
Sabba Khan
The heart of the renovation is the new staircase, comprising hundreds of pieces of milled birch ply. ‘It is the central moment of the building,’ Bonshek says of ‘the way the light filters down and plays off the form’. A tactile sweep of stacked wood, the staircase is a three-dimensional sculpture that now serves as a focal point for practically every room in the house. ‘Our original pitch was to bring out this central feature,’ says Sabba Khan and while some original doorways were closed off, other openings and connections were widened to accentuate views through the structure. With light cascading down from the glazed apex, the ribbon-like strips of birch animate the interior. Created by Landmark Joinery in Liverpool, the staircase was built off-site before being taken apart and assembled in just three days.
With the new staircase serving as the principal axis for the house, the architects worked with the pyramid’s geometric qualities, treating the house like an interlocking three-dimensional jigsaw. Practicalities were not so easily won, however. The quirks of the original layout had to be tempered, particularly the curious half-basement at the foot of the stairs, with a raised timber roof that ate into the ground-floor living room. Bonshek speculates that this was originally a stab at a very period-correct fallout shelter (‘it wouldn’t have been terribly effective’). Khan Bonshek has repurposed the basement as a library space at the foot of the stairs, with the same terrazzo flooring and duo-tone paint that inverts the colour scheme on the top floor.
The house is timber-framed, with four large beams running down the hipped gables. Instead of meeting the ground at each corner, the structure is raised up to create a shadow gap below the building, which cantilevers out from the foundations. Floor joists radiate from the centre. ‘[With a pyramid] you’re dealing with space in a completely different way,’ says Bonshek of the plan. The uppermost level was the most challenging to deal with. ‘The project is like a massive loft,’ says Khan, ‘everything is triangular.’
The architects have repurposed the eaves to incorporate two sleeping pods, alongside a wet room, powder room, compact sauna and office workspace, with an airy sitting room occupying the dormer extension. From here, a straight flight of stairs leads down the slope of the pyramid to the garden at the rear. One of the sleeping pods contains a fragment of the boldly patterned carpet designed for the ground floor by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen as part of the house’s turn-of-the-century TV makeover (‘Our clients are very attached to that carpet,’ Bonshek notes).
Another retention is the fragments of the diagonal wood cladding around the staircase lobby, painted and extended to form a frame. In addition to the terrazzo, there’s also oak flooring on the upper level, as well as bespoke new kitchen cabinetry and wardrobes. The two sleeping pods bring the total of bedrooms up to five, and the reconfigured plan makes use of every nook and cranny, with the heating and ventilation (provided by two new ground source heat pumps) woven into the structure. The original ‘Heath Robinson-type’ natural ventilation arrangement had to be replaced, and there’s also mechanical cooling, thanks to the ‘greenhouse on the roof’. As Bonshek notes, many of the Homeworld houses tend to overheat in the summer and are drafty during the winter.
With the interior resplendent in its new blue-green colour scheme – a counterpoint to the red shingle exterior – and that luminous staircase at its core, Khan Bonshek’s refurbishment bridges the eclectic postmodernism of the early 1980s with contemporary sensibilities and tastes. ‘The staircase is magical,’ says Khan. ‘If we ever had to do another pyramid, we’d know that the central core is the keystone of the piece.’ Make no mistake, the end result is still wonderfully eccentric as well as a lot more livable.
This article appears in the April 2026 Global Interiors Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 5 March 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today