Farmers Arms Cold Food Store is an experimental small building designed by Hayatsu Architects. It is situated in the Farmers Arms, a busy historic pub popular for locals and visitors in the Crake Valley, Lake District. The pub is run by Grizedale Arts, the arts organisation based in Coniston promoting the valuable function for art through commissioning, curating, making and education. The place holds a series of events and workshops, as a centre for learning crafts skills, collaborative production and expertise of non-artists.
The cold food store was conceived through the organisation’s annual building school. 13 international participants enrolled the seven days residency programme. We invited the local coppice worker Owen Jones and the Japanese plasterer Kiyoshi Fukuda from Yamaguchi as our instructors, teaching crafts skills through hands-on building applications. The aim of the programme is to exchange the knowledge and skills internationally and discover the similarities and differences using locally sourced materials.
The design of the building adapts the Japanese traditional storage building typology. Locally sourced larch timber frame sits on slate boulders from a nearby quarry, surpassing the need of concrete foundations.
The English wattle using hand split oak laths forms wall panels coated with a traditional Japanese Shikkui plaster. Shikkui is lime and sand mixed with a certain type of seaweed as a binder, providing a fire protection for the timber structure whilst maintaining its breathability.
The thick wood fibre wall maintains the stable internal temperature for storing vegetables and fermenting food. Externally the wall panels were decorated with food figures, using the traditional plaster pargeting technique.
The roof is lined with iron slags collected from the river in the valley. It acts as ballasts for anchoring down the building but also a reminder of the landscape’s industrial past, which is also reflected in the pink plaster pigmented with iron oxide.
