Outside the village of Barcombe, in the rolling South Downs, lies the Tin Tabernacle: a former chapel with walls of corrugated metal, a pitched roof and a tall, pink, arched front door. After almost 100 years as a church, the 139-year-old building had been used as community centre, wedding venue, meeting hall, office, workshop. Under its current owners, it gained a further use: an unusual family home.
When Peter and Heather Marshall bought the building in 2017, it was a derelict structure with planning permission in place to convert it to a residential home. “We’re architectural history freaks. We’ve always lived in houses that weren’t built as houses,” says Peter. “Also, my wife’s grandmother lived in a tin house in Norfolk as a child, so there’s a bit of a romantic thing there.”
Peter and Heather, now both 68, relocated from their converted coach house in Yorkshire —and home of 30 years— to bunk beds inside the old church (“it was absolutely freezing”), looking to throw themselves headfirst into the project. Despite their history of unusual houses, it was the first time they had taken on the conversion themselves. “Never had the time, never had the money. We threw ourselves in at the deep end.”
Originally a prefabricated Victorian structure, the chapel was built in Bermondsey and transferred to Barcombe around 1885. It remained a church until 1982, says Peter. The couple liked the plans for the building, which retained the primary structure of the chapel and added a new extension. “We built it so that it could be divided into two buildings, just in case we ran out of money,” says Peter. “We could live in the mission home bit, and then let out or use the other part as a granny flat.”
One of the greatest expenses of the restoration was the addition of a piled raft foundation —a concrete platform supported by 31 11-metre-long vertical columns— to prevent the building from sinking into the clay below. Two layers of insulation were added to the timber-framed building, along with an air source heat pump which powers the underfloor heating. “We only have the heating on for two months of the year,” says Peter. “A lot of people ask if it’s noisy with a metal roof and the ping ping ping of the rain. But no, it’s very, very quiet with the insulation.”
Inside, the mission hall was transformed into a minimalist, open plan living area with a vaulted ceiling and exposed timbers. There are two bedrooms inside the original building —one downstairs and one on a mezzanine— and a further two with a separate studio inside the cedar-clad extension. In total, the building now spans 1,678 square feet, plus a storage shed in the garden.
“We like very calm, very peaceful gallery spaces, and that’s what we tried to do here. It’s a very tranquil building,” says Peter. “It’s an old building that’s been recreated into a modern building. We wanted to create a loft-type space, but in the middle of the fields. And lateral living – we like that.”
Inspired by the sculptural concrete design of Wakefield’s Hepworth gallery, Peter and Heather opted for white walls, a glazed concrete floor and a sleek kitchen with integrated appliances. The pink, hardwood front door, replaced after the original was lost to rot, adds a rare pop of colour. “There’s a slight nod to the fact that it was a place of worship, because the little window at the front has a cross on it. When the sun comes through, the shadow on the floor moves around the building.”
In the extension, equipped for use as a self-contained apartment, there are floor-to-ceiling sliding doors and a clean, neutral-toned colour scheme. Outside, there is a gravelled garden with terracing, raised beds, a sedum lawn, and a seating area for outdoor dining.
“It flows beautifully from one room to another; from the old to the new…The bright light is lovely,” says Peter. “It’s very calm, very peaceful. You feel like you’re in the landscape.”
In total, the build took two and a half years and cost around £350,000, says Peter, with the pile raft constituting a major —and unexpected— expense. During the process, they found some marks of the property’s history embedded in its walls: a ticket showing that it had come from Bermondsey Metalworks and a small model Buddha added to protect the building. “We put it back in the wall so it’s there for posterity.”
In 2021, a year after the building was completed, it won a Sussex Heritage Award, proudly displayed on a plaque outside the front door. The Tin Tabernacle continues to attract interest from locals who remember the building from different phases of its history. Peter and Heather met the man who converted it from a church to a youth club in 1982, for example, while a couple who had celebrated their wedding reception at the church had knocked on the door during lockdown.
“We’ve had people who’ve said it was a Dad’s Army place, a boxing club, the church youth club, a music practice space, a nursery for kids in the village,” says Peter. “There’s a lot of history. I think one of the reasons that it was never knocked down was because it was a place of local interest. There are people who believe it should be here, and we’ve sort of saved it.”
Now, though, after four years of enjoying the revived Tin Tabernacle as their home, Peter and Heather are downsizing. The property has been listed with Strutt & Parker for £950,000. They believe it would suit a creative person, able to use the extension as an office, home workshop or studio.
“That’s what we would like,” he says. “It was a pre-packed [Victorian] building. We’ve made a permanent building out of a temporary one.”
