Inside A Modern Arts And Crafts-Inspired Family Home

I think the house means the end of a long journey for us, where you have to dig deep and get through some ups and downs. It means something to the two of us that we've got somewhere that we can live with our family and be able to be grounded in just one place. The existing house, it was really on its last legs. It had been extended in a very sort of haphazard way. We went through two or three different designs of trying to use the old house. We sort of inched to the point where we just said, right, we're going to have to build a new house. I think we wanted to create something that would just be a great family home, that would have a lovely open plan feel to it. Something that would be designed so that when the kids were no longer at home, we didn't feel like we were rattling around the house, just the two of us. This is a conservation area, so we needed to work with that, but we did definitely want to make a contemporary house. That's quite a difficult balance. That's where we relied on rural office who designed the house. If you look at the house, it's clear that it's making arts and crafts references. It was a reaction against modernised, mass-produced Victorian buildings and furniture. You've got a very traditional material palette with the clay tiles, the pitch of the roof and the render, but we've tried to sharpen that up and use traditional materials, but in a more contemporary way. When we had just initiated the project, we managed to go through this whole period of cycling crashes and several quite large surgeries. Everything was put on hold, and actually it made us rethink some of the design elements. Were we building it for somebody else and to be able to sell it in the future, or were we building it for us? Now that we've both recovered, it's the house where you want to be able to live and be healthy and have people around. It's a house that's just for living in, and for riding boots and for bikes and for wellingtons and all the comings and goings.