Glade Inflation

For almost a decade, the artist Matthew Darbyshire (WoI Nov 2025) and his family have been building an avant-garde idyll – part rural getaway, part sculpture park and workshop venue for art students – in a patch of woodland in Kent. On the afternoon in early May that I visit, Matthew’s wife, Grace, picks me up at a nearby station, and the countryside is a creamy riot of cow parsley and hawthorn blossom. The roads quickly narrow to rough dappled tracks, and Grace warns me to relax in my seat: the going may get bumpy. We’re now deep in the woods: sweet chestnut, sycamore, the odd dried-up ash and a flood of bluebells. At the end of the trail the first building reveals itself, curved and corrugated. But I’m distracted by something in the undergrowth: busts of three women with their eyes closed – the artist’s mother, Pippa, Grace and their daughter, Dorothy. It’s hard to know what timescale is at work: the sculptures look contemporary but already ancient, green-stained and spalling.

Matthew and Grace bought this plot shortly before they married in the summer of 2016. They cleared many trees and brambles, sank a borehole to supply running water, built a kitchen and bathroom, and even started on a pond. When I first went there a few years later, the footing was still treacherous in places, and accommodation consisted of tents on wooden platforms. A few sculptures were there, skeins of extruded concrete looking stark and raw. The place already seemed an expression of its owners’ artistic ambitions, practical nous and sense of adventure. The most impressive structure then was the small black barn, c1920s, serving as kitchen and living room, which they’d bought in Sussex. The building, with its bitumen-covered walls, has provided a design vocabulary for the whole site, as well as a link to the antique and modern moods, shapes and ideas in Matthew’s art.

The cabin containing a kitchen and living space dates from the 1920s and was once a galvanised-steel barn. Matthew Darbyshire bought it locally in Kent, attracted to the corrugations that are wider than might be found in later examples, and to the lead flashing around the windows. In the foreground sit extruded-concrete artworks from a series titled ‘Xerox’, originally commissioned by Nottingham Castle in 2016

Over tea and cake in the shade, they describe how the buildings and other structures have developed. ‘There’s a language which we wanted,’ says Matthew. ‘It’s a bit American – what era would that be, with the corrugated bitumen barn? – but it’s also not a million miles from Derek Jarman’s cottage [at Dungeness; WoI June 2019].’ Next to the barn, across a small expanse of rescued Yorkstone, sits the bathroom, which in profile looks like something you might see at much vaster scale on a Canadian prairie or on the industrial banks of the Ruhr. Dotted around this main living area are three ‘sleeping pods’ elevated on ziggurats of old tyres. They’re perhaps the most defining structures of all. Matthew had originally wanted standard shipping containers, but bringing a crane into the woods was impossible. He opted instead for flat-packed equivalents, modifying the roofs so they now resemble the pop-top sleeping decks of classic VW camper vans. The design’s slanted tops and lone window also call to mind a sinister, watchful version of Le Corbusier’s Cabanon on the Côte d’Azur (WoI April 2003).

The interior of the kitchen cabin is sheathed in sweet-chestnut wood from the surrounding woodland. Some rougher-hewn timbers can be seen below the window. The floor is of Yorkstone, salvaged by Matthew’s wife, Grace, from a driveway in Bexley, London. She, too, is responsible for the bottles of home-brewed beer, seen beyond the ladder’s rungs along with a work by his mother, the painter Pippa Darbyshire

The rotunda sauna amounts to a third attempt – one fell down, the other burned – and is lined with brick inside. Outside sit two Robin Day chairs and a livestock trough for plunging.

In a departure from, say, his 3D-printing technique, Matthew modelled busts of his family in Jesmonite. In the woods, squirrels have eaten away at the sculptures’ faces – but not Grace’s nose, which is a replacement in concrete

Matthew points back towards their plot’s entrance: ‘Then there’s the Nissen hut, which is intended to be a sawmill. That was such a pleasure to put up, such a good design.’ The hut in question is an interwar example of a structure first built to house troops during World War I and later used for storage, civilian accommodation, school classrooms and much else. Matthew painted fibreglass on to its panels and peeled it off to make opaque windows. But the most impressive feature is the gull-wing door he’s devised, which swings out elegantly and is ballasted with long concrete weights on chains. By the entrance, rhyming formally with the hut’s contours, two galvanised-metal bins are being turned into duck houses.

‘We had a fetish for details,’ Matthew says back at the kitchen, drawing my attention to one of the most satisfying: the windows that slot into place and rest on pegs while the lead frame is folded round them, looking pliable as pastry frills. Even the edges of the doors here have been given the Darbyshires’ keen attention, with the black metal folding round to form a soft edge that fits comfortably in the hand. This kind of knowing care with everyday or industrial materials is familiar from Matthew’s art, which often involves painstaking labour to make sculptures inspired by digitally designed forms, or employs the materials of mass production to mythical or playfully art-historical ends.

The sleeping cabins are adapted from shipping containers. These arrived flat-packed, and Matthew decided to raise the roof at an angle, adding a window. Oriented strand board (OSB) coats the inside

In the woods, examples and fragments of such works look futuristic and archaeological at the same time. Leaning against the black-walled sauna are the separated limbs, head and torso of a Hercules with the stepped texture of a 3D-printed object. (His origins are cruder than it seems: Matthew shaped this figure by cutting sheets of polystyrene with a bread knife.) The dismembered giant looks out on the overgrown hollow of the pond, abandoned when the Darbyshires’ JCB digger gave out. The machine is still there, and sitting beneath its paralysed arm is Matthew’s smoothly finished Galatea: she’s at once the living statue legendarily sculpted by Pygmalion, a figure often paired historically with Hercules, and the character of the same name in Disney’s TV spin-off of its 1997 Hercules film.

The Darbyshires’ sylvan plot can feel timeless on a day like this: unruly trees pollarded as they’ve been for centuries, teeming caterpillars promising flickery mothlight on summer nights, traces of deer and wild boar down by the stream at the edge of the property. Grace, who works in nature conservation, outlines an ethos for how things work here: an economy and rhythm of work that’s as circular as possible, from the solar panels installed in a nearby clearing to the goats they hope to bring in to munch on bramble leaves. Even the earth might prove useful: brickworks once dotted these woods, and the clay is still ‘ready to go – it just comes out of the ground blue’. An elemental place, but with its face to the future.

To learn more about Matthew Darbyshire, visit heraldst.com

A version of this article appears in the May 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox