The Wadsdon Estate, an ensemble of the late 19th century, was created by the Rothschild barons. In 1957 they donated it to the National Trust and since then it has been open to the public as a museum, but the family continues to take care of the architectural monument they owned.
This is done through the Rothschild Charitable Foundation, for which Stephen Marshall built a small "headquarters" on the outskirts of the estate, in the town of Windmill Hill. The building is located on a hill overlooking the main house of the French Renaissance estate and the surrounding picturesque landscape. It took the place of a dairy farm: at first the architect wanted to rebuild its buildings for archives and offices, but they were too dilapidated, and reconstruction was impossible.
However, the new structure reminds of English agricultural buildings in its appearance: it received walls of oak planks and bricks, partially covered with white plaster, windows are equipped with oak shutters, gable roofs are covered with tiles and zinc sheets.
The complex is organized around two courtyards. The first, front door, is occupied by a decorative pond and irgi trees. To the left of the entrance there is a 2-storey building of the fund's offices, where there are also meeting rooms, and to the right is the building of the reading room of the archive with a glass wall, which is hidden from the sun by a “fence” made of oak posts: similar ones protect local traditional cowsheds from the wind.
The building of the reading room has a different facade with a gallery located there into the second courtyard with a lawn. This courtyard is limited by the building of the archive itself (thanks to the 1.5 m thick walls it is always cool there) and its administrative premises.
In the interior, the most noteworthy are the overlapping double-height spaces of the reading room and gallery: this is an oak lattice structure. The rooms are furnished with Eames furniture and other Vitra products, but large oak tables for readers are designed by the Marshall Bureau.
