A Manchester Period Property
A 130-year-old Manchester property taken through in full: formal lounge, kitchen, guest suite, and a basement holding a bar, a gym and a spa.
The showroom is in Bowdon, about half an hour from central Manchester, and a good deal of the studio’s work is in the city and the suburbs south of it: Didsbury, Chorlton, Whalley Range, Sale and Altrincham, along with apartments closer to the centre.
Manchester housing falls into three groups that need different things. Victorian and Edwardian villas with the proportions and the problems that come with them, inter-war and post-war family houses in the suburbs, and city apartments where the constraint is not space but daylight and the fact that almost nothing can be fixed to a wall without thought.
The showroom is at York House, Vicarage Lane, Bowdon WA14 3BA, open Monday to Saturday 9am to 5pm. More about the showroom.
Victorian and Edwardian houses
South Manchester has a great many of them, and they reward the same approach: restore or replicate what is worth keeping, then be thoroughly contemporary about everything else. Fireplaces, cornice and joinery are the character; the heating, the lighting and the storage almost never are, and there is no virtue in a Victorian solution to a modern problem.
These houses are usually taken on in phases, because the structural work and the decoration cannot sensibly happen in the same month. The one decision that has to come first is the palette, since the rooms are seen through each other from the hall.
Apartments in the city
An apartment is a different discipline. Window treatments have to work with fixed glazing and often with a service riser in the wrong place, lighting has to be added without touching the ceiling in some buildings, and every large piece has to get through a lift and a corridor, which is a measurement worth taking before anything is ordered.
The upside is that an apartment can be changed convincingly with furniture, lighting, artwork and window treatments alone, with no building work at all.
How it works from Bowdon
Most of the work happens in the showroom rather than at the house: fabrics, wallpapers, timber and stone seen together, in the light they will actually live in. That keeps visits to the property down, which matters more when the property is in the city and parking is part of the plan.
Deliveries are consolidated where they can be, for the same reason. A house with three installation days in it is easier to live in than one with ten, and in an apartment block it is often the difference between a straightforward installation and a difficult one.
Questions we get asked
Do you work in Manchester city centre?
Yes, apartments included. The showroom is half an hour away and the sample work happens there rather than at the property.
Can you take on one room?
Yes. A design fee of £300 covers one room and is refunded against what you order.
Do you handle the installation?
Yes: sourcing, project management and installation are handled together once the scheme is agreed, and fitted joinery is designed here and installed by the workshops we have used for years.
A Manchester project in full
A 130-year-old property over three floors, taken through in full and later given a basement holding a bar, a gym and a spa. It is the fullest account of how a period house in the city is actually put back together.