A Marine Villa

This is a replacement house on a superb site in the south of England, with remarkable views across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. Our clients initially sought a symmetrical, classical house but after further discussion we developed a design based closely on the beautiful series of Picturesque Italianate villas designed by the Regency Architect John Nash. The most famous of these houses is Cronkhill, in Shropshire, now owned by the National Trust, and our research included measuring many of the rooms and details there.

The New Forest has extremely strict planning rules. Working with landscape architect Kim Wilkie, we steered an application through planning with a surprising lack of complication. Work started on site in 2015.

An Early Georgian House

This house is more of a cottage – with tiny rooms and a wonderful, diminutive scale – in a fabulous terrace of Grade II listed early Georgian houses on the edge of Highgate, then just a small country village now consumed into London.

Our clients are a young family who had lived in the house for a number of years and loved it – but needed to make it better fit for their lifestyle. A dark galley kitchen was ripped out and we tore off awful rear extensions before remodelling to create a new lower-ground floor kitchen and, at the ground floor, an octagonal bay bookroom/study in place of a miserable and barely-used WC.

The practice detailed an entire joinery package drawing inspiration from the original rooms to create a seamless integration between old and new.  While the interior architecture is restrained, the decoration took a bolder and more colourful approach to create a happy and cheerful family home.

Remodeled Manor House

At a beautiful site above Beaminster, in West Dorset, we are working on a major remodeling of a recently constructed house (completed in 2000) that lacks character and is very poorly planned and detailed.

In the building’s favour, it has a sensational location, with fine views in every direction and a south-facing main elevation – not always the case in Dorset. Moreover the scale and shape of the existing house was not without merit. As is so often the way, its failings were in the detail – making for a building that could and should have been beautiful, but was in fact dull, lifeless and without character.

Over a period of several months we have developed a re-working of the internal layouts to make a much better-planned family home, and developed ideas for the complete remodeling of the exterior which will involve construction of new stone mullioned bay windows, incorporation of new stone and leaded light windows throughout, replacement of the poor quality slate roof and demolition of a large and ill-sited conservatory to form a new much smaller garden room attached to the house.

We have worked alongside the landscape architect Pip Morrison to create a much finer setting for the house, and which links the building to the wider landscape through a series of low terraced walls and classic English borders.