Rare’s Barn X is a 1,200-square-metre game development building on the studio’s existing Leicestershire campus. Microsoft UK fully unveiled it on Earth Day, 22 April 2024, reporting all-electric operation, a mass-timber structure, solar panels nearby and workplace features designed to support different ways of working. The project’s reported design choices are not the same as independently measured energy, carbon or water savings.
What Barn X is and why Rare unveiled it for Earth Day
Barn X is a new workspace for the team behind Sea of Thieves, built on Rare’s existing campus near Twycross in Leicestershire. Microsoft UK’s 22 April 2024 feature says staff had been settling into the 1,200-square-metre building over the preceding year before Rare fully unveiled it for Earth Day 2024. The project was commissioned in 2020.
Rare studio head Craig Duncan described the brief as a question: “What might the gaming studio of the future look like?” Rare worked on the project with Microsoft’s real estate team, London architecture firm LOM and Dublin-based sustainability design advisers RKD. Microsoft UK reported that Barn X had recently received LEED Gold certification when its feature was published; that is the status reported at the time, not a separately verified current update.
How the building’s design addresses energy and materials
All-electric operation and mass timber
Microsoft UK describes Barn X as running purely on electricity and as Xbox’s first mass-timber building in Europe. The building’s inner timber structure was locally sourced. Its exterior cladding, however, uses New Zealand Accoya, a choice that reflects a durability and maintenance trade-off rather than a straightforward preference for the nearest material.
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In the 2024 feature, RKD sustainability and research director Sean Hogan said the Accoya cladding was expected to last 60 years without varnish or a paint finishing coat. He contrasted it with softer local birch or larch, which he said would require a sealer and might need replacing within 15 years—potentially three replacements over the building’s service life. These are attributed material-life claims in Microsoft’s account, not the results of a published lifecycle assessment. The feature provides no embodied-carbon calculation to quantify how transport, finishing and replacement compare.
Solar panels, water reuse and ongoing controls
A field near the building has 750 square metres of solar panels. Microsoft UK says the installation offsets some of the studio’s energy consumption, but gives no electricity-generation, emissions-reduction or annual-savings figure.
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Barn X also reuses condensate water from its chillers to flush toilets. Cooling and ventilation services are housed in the pitched roof. Facility staff have data and controls intended to help them keep optimising energy use. Hogan said: “It’s not a building that’s sitting still in terms of its energy performance,” but the feature reports no measured performance trend or quantified result.
How Barn X connects to Rare’s campus
Microsoft UK describes Rare’s campus as 100 acres of Midlands countryside near Twycross, with a wildflower meadow and beehives. Barn X’s large windows, foliage and vertical gardens bring greenery into the building, while paths connect it with the grounds and the nearby solar farm. Those features place the studio in its landscape; the source does not quantify their environmental effects.
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Workplace features for different ways of working
The reported interior combines spacious areas, ventilation and natural light with sit-stand desks and adjustable desk lighting. Collaborative areas sit alongside quiet spaces, sound-deadened zones and places intended for calm or privacy. Microsoft UK says the design team considered neurodiversity, rather than relying on a single open-plan layout for everyone.
Duncan summed up the work as “that magical mix of technology, creativity, teamwork and artwork.” These are design features and intentions described by Microsoft UK; its feature does not establish measured effects on staff wellbeing or productivity.
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What the Earth Day reveal does—and does not—show
Barn X is a specific building project, not evidence by itself that Microsoft has achieved its broader environmental targets. Microsoft’s stated commitments to become carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030 apply company-wide. The Earth Day feature describes Barn X’s systems and design, but supplies no independently verified building-level energy, carbon or water savings.
All project details and status above are drawn from Microsoft UK’s 22 April 2024 feature on Barn X.
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