Extract from Hugh Pearman article:

“Well away from the often febrile architectural scene of London - indeed, well away from any big city of any kind – [Stan Bolt] is quietly assembling a portfolio of imaginatively designed modern houses that are as good as any to be found in Britain. His four-person office in the fishing port of Brixham is working flat-out on around 20 commissions at the moment. Many are, as always in this kind of work, extensions and conversions. But an increasing number are complete one-off houses. And these are very good indeed.

It has been a bit of a struggle to get to this point. After working for several years for one of the best domestic architects of his generation, Oxfordshire-based Peter Aldington, Bolt was faced with a choice. "I could have gone on into one of the big London practices - Foster or Rogers or whoever," he says. "But I didn't want to be an anonymous part of a big machine." He made the Quixotic decision not only to strike out on his own, but to avoid the capital altogether and return to his Devon roots. It was the early 1990s and there was not a lot of work to be had. So he did what architects do: a bit of teaching, the low-budget conversion of an old building into his own home, and - gradually - the work began to come in.

Bolt started to be noticed with local and national architecture awards but his big break came in 2000 with the completion of the accomplished O'Sullivan house, built right on the sea wall of Salcombe - it's a magical place poised over the waves, bathed in reflected light. The house got a lot of publicity and Bolt has been busy pretty much ever since…

The completed house I have come to see… set high on a ridge near Torquay, has stupendous views to the sea one way, and to Dartmoor the other. In between the two, it commands a lush valley and has a long, long garden swooping down the hill into it….

[The] house has presence. We arrive in late afternoon and the low sun is shining right through the first floor of the house, silhouetting it dramatically against the skyline. A garage is set to one side by the gateway, which is some way from the house itself, separated by a long front garden. So you don't get that thing of cars cluttering up the front of the house. On the contrary, to get to the front door you have to cross a large moat-like pond. The composition stands proud: white-painted ground floor, projecting timber-clad first floor, divided vertically by a rounded staircase tower.

The layout is very logical. Bedrooms are private - the main upstairs one having strategically-placed windows which look straight out into the sculptural boughs of trees front and back - and only the upper and lower living spaces overlook each other, which is what you need to keep a conversation going. Heating comes from beneath the ash -wood floors. There's a back door which has a herb garden outside and which leads directly into a utility room, thence to the kitchen. So it's a very practical house. But the way Bolt has intersected the living spaces inside, and shuffled the cubic volumes of the house outside to break down its bulk and make it dynamic, is architecture of a high order.

He certainly had a gift of a site, as his clients are well aware. It is an enormous plot of land, a broad ribbon that runs over the top of the ridge and a good way down the other side, with the house at the crest. So not only do they have great views, not only are they handy for the Devon beaches a few miles away, but they have their own domain - complete with a couple of pampered sheep in a paddock and a garden that descends in broad steps into the valley. “