A note from our founder
I've spent my whole working life in timber, glass and light. I grew up in the building firm my father founded in 1946, trained in fine art and building construction, and cut my teeth as lead designer at Caulfield's before founding Oak Leaf Conservatories, where we won Gold at Chelsea and shipped our glasshouses to homes across America.
Twenty years at the top of British luxury design followed, including leading the national showroom network at Smallbone of Devizes and launching the brand in New York. In 2017 I came back to where it all started, and founded Glass House Architecture to do one thing: bespoke glazed buildings, designed and made properly.
Here's the full story.
Mark Caulfield, Founder
1946
Caulfield's
Eighty years in the making
The Glass House story begins in a joinery workshop. In 1946, Mark's father came home from the Second World War and founded Caulfield's (Tees-side) Ltd, a Yorkshire building firm that grew to over a hundred skilled craftsmen. Caulfield's built and maintained public houses across the North for the big brewery estates of the day: John Smith's, Samuel Smith's, Tetley's and Trust House Forte.
It was here, as demand grew for orangeries and glazed dining extensions, that the family found its calling. The bespoke joinery shop at the heart of Caulfield's is where our approach was formed: everything designed properly, everything made properly, in timber and glass.
Oak Leaf Conservatories
Oak Leaf Conservatories
The orangery work outgrew the building firm, so it became a firm of its own. Oak Leaf Conservatories was founded in 1985 with a purpose-designed factory on Clifton Moor in York, dedicated entirely to glazed buildings.
Oak Leaf set the standard we still work to today. The firm restored the Broughton Hall orangery, the world's first curved glass dome conservatory, and won a Gold Medal for it at the 1990 Chelsea Flower Show - working in collaboration with Eric Kyte of Kyte International, designer for Walt Disney and Wynn casinos. Its reputation carried across the Atlantic, where half of everything made in the York workshops ended up, a 40-foot container leaving for America every week. Proof that Yorkshire glasswork could compete with anyone in the world.
1985
Featured project
The Broughton Hall orangery
Broughton Hall, near Skipton, has been home to the Tempest family for a thousand years. In 1853 they added one of the great glasshouses of the Victorian age: a domed conservatory of stone, iron and curved glass, designed by the Bradford architects Andrews and Delaunay, placed so its light pours through the front door of the Hall itself.
By the time Oak Leaf was entrusted with its restoration, the dome had stood for over 130 years. Recreating curved glasswork of that ambition, faithfully to the original, was the making of the firm's reputation. The restored conservatory was showcased at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1990, where it took the Gold Medal, and it still crowns the gardens at Broughton today, later featured in Country Life's survey of Britain's great Victorian glasshouses.
1996
A Bespoke Luxury
Mastering the Craft
After Oak Leaf was sold, the next two decades were spent inside Britain's finest luxury houses, including twenty years with Smallbone of Devizes, the country's most celebrated bespoke kitchen maker, running thirteen showrooms, personally designing spaces for Robert De Niro and Oprah Winfrey and opening the brand's flagships in Manhattan and Connecticut.
Those years shaped how Glass House treats its clients. Serving the most demanding customers in Britain and America teaches you what true bespoke means: listening first, designing around the way people actually live, and never letting a detail slide.
2017
Glass house architecture
Glass House Architecture
Glass House Architecture is where 80 years of that experience come together. The joinery discipline of Caulfield's. The glasswork mastery of Oak Leaf. The client standards of the great luxury houses. Every orangery, conservatory, outdoor kitchen and glass extension we design draws on eighty years of family craft in timber, glass and light.
Featured project
Award Winning Winter Garden in North Yorkshire
This large family house in Ilkley began life as a farmhouse, gaining an Edwardian extension and, twenty years ago, a period-style wooden conservatory. The owners wanted to change how the whole house flows, so the old conservatory came down and in its place we designed a double-volume glass building linking the main house to a new pool house, with views over open countryside on one side and an internal garden courtyard on the other.
The structure is entirely bespoke: all aluminium, made to order in Germany, with performance up to Passivhaus standards and a reverse-pitch roof drawn to match the sightlines of the existing buildings. Bi-fold doors open the room fully into the garden, with the same stone flooring running from inside straight out onto the terrace. The project was a finalist at the 2017 International Design & Architecture Awards, in the Architectural Glasshouse over £150,000 category.
BEGIN Your project
The next chapter is yours.
Tell us a little about your home and we will be in touch to arrange your design consultation, at the showroom or at your property.
Prefer to talk?
Call us on 0113 518 3766
or email us at info@glasshousearchitecture.co.uk