In Summary.

We used our home as a demonstration piece to showcase our work. Now we've started on a new one. These are those places.

The old house in the Cotswolds was a pigsty when we bought it with just mud floors, brick and stone walls and the roof, nothing else. We developed it completely ourselves, from designing to building. We made it fully breathable to preserve the existing Victorian agricultural structure and kept the intrusions of domestic life as pared back as possible so as to retain the character of the original building. For budget and sustainability we used reclaimed materials throughout - both building materials and furnishings.

The new house in Herefordshire is a black and white timber framed farmhouse and courtyard of old barns. The house, although medieval at it’s core, has been unsympathetically renovated in the 70s and within the last few years. We’ve only been here for 3 months and are in the throws of stripping back to find what remains of the original house. It’s rather a tale of domestic archaeology inside and out currently as we unearth outbuildings and cobbles and strip back plastic paint to reveal beautifully textured Georgian lime plaster walls (aswell as 70s gypsum and modern expanding foam). So this one is fascinating but not pretty particularly yet.