The striking stepped arches of the family house rise from the open fields of the South Downs National Park. The materiality of the house relates to surrounding farm buildings as well as layers of reference, being described by Adam Richards as ‘an industrial ruin wrapped in a Roman ruin’.

Influences range from the formal architecture of Vanbrugh and Palladio’s plans for the Villa Barbaro to the Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky, whose film Stalker has inspired the sense of destination embodied in the house.

In the context of the Polaroids by Andrey Tarkovsky exhibition, film scholar Dr Mark Le Fanu will introduce the work and legacy of the seminal filmmaker, setting the scene before the evening’s focus on Nithurst Farm.