The Best House in the World

Of all the beautiful houses, magnificent mansion, edifices, or whatever you might like to call it, that you have come across or would ever get to see and feel, did you ever think it would be easy to tag a particular building the best in the world?

Well, of course someone (a house in this case) always has to get the crown. It may look more like a glorified wartime bunker than a classic manor but this modernist three-bedroom Oxfordshire home described as a ‘radical take on the English country house’ is deemed the best house in the world.

According to mailOnline, Despite being a far cry from a grand mansion or stately home, the futuristic house near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, has beaten off worldwide competition to be crowned the best new home by architecture industry bible The Architectural Review.

Described by the judges as having a ‘rigid, rhythmic façade’ and a ‘challenging’ design, the ‘asymmetrical’ property was completed in 2013

Instead of a farmhouse kitchen or cosy living rooms like other country houses, this property is bare, simple and modern with a ‘rigid façade’

The property is owned by Mike Spink, an Oxfordshire-based multi-millionaire property tycoon who once spent £42million developing a country estate called Park Place near Henley-on-Thames before selling it to Russian billionaire Andrey Borodin for a record-breaking £140million

The multi-millionaire property developer Mike Spink paid £6.7million for the prime 50-acre plot in the Chilterns in 2008 before knocking down the existing house on the site.

The site was previously occupied by an early 20th-century house – said to be of no ‘architectural value’ – which was made up of a series of eight buildings, including stables, a gym, a greenhouse and an outdoor swimming pool.

Like the best country piles, the house – called Faylands – is nestled among rolling hills and surrounded by a wildflower meadow with its own herd of cows

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But that’s where the similarities end.

Instead of cosy rooms with roaring fires, a farmhouse kitchen with an Aga or a traditional brick exterior, the house is simple and modern to the verge of being empty.

A total of 11 concrete columns hold up the front of the property making it look more like an industrial unit than a home, while the flat roof and oblong-shape make it resemble more of a bunker than a sprawling estate.

However the judges of The Architectural Review House Awards 2015 – a competition to find the world’s best house built in the last five years – heaped praise on it.

Some of the biggest names in modern architecture described it as ‘a radical take on the English country house’, ‘subversive and as having a ‘beautiful enfilade’ – where a suite of rooms with doorways are in line with each other.

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