A cottage in Cheshire, set in leafy grounds, with gardens kept to a standard that made them impossible to ignore from inside the house. We designed several areas of the property over a period, and the clients left reviews on social media after each one.
They knew what they liked straight away and were open to ideas they had not expected. They took the unexpected options and have not regretted a single one of them.
Taking the colour from the garden
On the ground floor, the link with what is outside the windows mattered more than anything else. The teals and greens in the lounge echo the trees and the planting, so the room reads as part of the garden rather than as a room with a view of one.
All the rooms are in warm colours. The accessories, sculptures and glass dishes with coordinating glass wall art were selected from stock in the showroom and tried in the rooms themselves before anything was bought, which is the only reliable way to judge a piece against a wall.
The bedroom and dressing room
An awkward ceiling shape and an unusual footprint did not stop the bedroom being a cosy one. It has a dressing room alongside it, with a touch of glamour in the details and finishes, and fitted storage that takes the shape of the room instead of fighting it.
Cottages and period homes in Cheshire
Older houses in Cheshire tend to come with the same set of constraints: awkward ceiling shapes, rooms that are not square, and windows that are the best thing in the room and cannot be moved. None of those are problems to design around so much as things to design towards, which is what happened here.
Schemes are put together in the showroom in Bowdon with the samples in front of you. For a house where the garden is doing half the work, that matters more than usual: greens and teals shift completely between a showroom light and the light of the room they are going into.