One-door Napoleonic defense tower is your new evil headquarters [Fortress]

This can be a 30-foot-tall Martello Tower in Suffolk, England. It has one door, 13-foot-thick walls, and was built to keep Napoleon out of England. This particular fortress was refurbished with a comfy interior. It’s perfect for keeping out nosy do-gooders.

This Martello Tower , Tower Y, is owned by Duncan Jackson , who redesigned this one-time gunpowder and cannonball storehouse into a trendy home with the assistance of Piercy Conner Architects . Jackson discovered the decaying tower on a Suffolk farm in 2000, and there began a 10-year quest to rework this one-door monolith into a home with all of the mod cons. Jackson told The Guardian :

I spent a year in negotiation with the farmer. He put in mains water and electricity, but I did need to withstand the undeniable fact that the tower was a Scheduled Monument, that it was on the Buildings in danger register, and that it’s portion of a local of exceptional Natural Beauty that’s also a website of Special Scientific Interest. Given all this, perhaps I have to have cut my losses and walked away [...] There are people that say the towers shouldn’t become homes because this takes far from their historic role. But if they aren’t going to be lived in, what’s to happen to them? People that hadn’t been blasted away during target practice by the military have often been left to rot, and then demolished.

The tower was abandoned in 1870, but Jackson has turned this 750,000-brick hulk into something livable. Also, if he wants to keep out unwanted solicitors, he just must smash the stairs.

[Spotted on Inhabitat . Photos via Edmund Sumner.]

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This post is tagged: martello tower, natural beauty, suffolk england, target practice, undeniable fact