Location: Carlisle, United Kingdom

Design Team: De Matos Ryan

Area: Not published

Completion: 2025

Category: Cultural Architecture, Museum Renovation

Photography: Hufton + Crow

Design Features: Tullie Museum stands in Carlisle's historic quarter in Cumbria. Over more than 130 years, its collection of buildings expanded deep within the block, leaving the institution with an uncertain relationship to Castle Street. Guided by a 'People, Place and Heritage' approach, De Matos Ryan has reworked the visitor journey through five adjoining terraced houses, a new entrance, community rooms, a shop and the Carlisle Gallery. For the first time, the museum addresses the high street as a coherent civic presence.

The new entrance occupies a former service yard behind the terrace, once used for an electricity substation and mechanical plant. A tall portal of locally sourced Cumbrian red limestone echoes the proportions of the museum's historic entrance while establishing a marker visible along the street. Its double-height interior serves as foyer, social space and event venue. A step-free route negotiates the complex levels between existing buildings and reconnects the cafe, shop, community rooms and galleries.

Historic fabric and new work are read as parts of one arrival sequence. Repeated arches link the foyer, shop, cafe and first-floor studios within the refurbished terraces, while new stonework, existing brick and the conserved Grade I-listed Gatehouse retain distinct material identities. Moving from street to gatehouse, courtyard and welcome space, visitors encounter the museum as part of the city's pedestrian fabric rather than an institution hidden behind it.

The Carlisle Gallery transforms the former atrium entrance of a 1990s extension. Later clutter has been removed, allowing pale floors, white arches and bespoke poplar display cases to form a quieter setting. Instead of dividing the gallery into enclosed rooms, the cases layer the space while preserving long views across the ground floor. A horizontal pegboard system supports changing displays, allowing natural history, social life and industrial memory to be revised as Carlisle itself evolves.

A light-touch environmental strategy limits structural intervention and new internal walls while retaining ventilation equipment that still has useful life. Local red stone, lime mortar and traditional leadwork sit alongside low-VOC finishes. A sedum roof extends biodiversity across the new entrance, daylight reaches deeper into the building, and solar-control film reduces ultraviolet exposure and summer overheating in the glazed atrium. Tullie's renewal is therefore expressed through thresholds, routes and ways of displaying a city, returning its collections to contemporary public life.

Design Team: De Matos Ryan was founded in London in 1999 by architects Angus Morrogh-Ryan and José Esteves de Matos. Both studied at the University of Cambridge and spent time at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Morrogh-Ryan developed an early interest in theatres, education, arts and community projects, while Esteves de Matos has extensive experience with listed buildings, planning and the delivery of museums, hotels and schools.

The practice works across architecture, interiors and landscape, with particular expertise in contemporary interventions within historic and culturally sensitive settings. Open collaboration with clients and consultants replaces predetermined formal solutions. Function, construction, long-term stewardship and public use shape each commission, with tactile experience, social purpose and carefully resolved detail recurring throughout the work.

Sustainability forms part of the studio’s default design process. Passive and low-energy measures, building services, material provenance and whole-life value are considered from the outset so that environmental performance supports the architecture rather than appearing as an added layer. The practice has received RIBA, Civic Trust, European Hotel Design, FX and D&AD awards.