Arts and Crafts House

The owners of this spacious five-bedroom house in Berkshire had a tremendous flair for fun and an appetite for design that they wanted their home to reflect. Built in the late 19th century as an Arts and Crafts cottage, it had been unsympathetically added to over time resulting in a dark warren of rooms. Our job was to make sense of the place – to create spaces that would work for family life and feel coherent. We remodelled the entrance hall, with new stairs and windows that bring daylight into the centre of the building. We turned a dingy corridor into a bar and created an intimate space in the drawing room by shutting off one of the many doors and creating a window seat. The piece de resistance has to be the family room, now with deep green walls, where we opened up the ceiling and added panelling. Furniture and decorative items throughout the house are a mix of antiques and pieces by some of our favourite English makers, including Christopher Howe, Max Rollitt, Soane, Rosi de Ruig, Mathew Cox and Christine Van Der Hurd.