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The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Homes for sale in England and Scotland with inside-outside space
Five miles west of North Berwick and 20 miles from Edinburgh, sits Gullane, a picturesque town on the coast of the Firth of Forth. Home to families who move out of the Scottish capital for more space, it is also popular with golfers – there are four golf courses on the doorstep. For sale is this four-bedroom, two-bathroom, B-listed house with a gravelled driveway and an open-plan extension at the back. Wide timber steps connect the timber extension to the lawn and an outdoor kitchen area with seating and an open fire. £660,000. Rettie, 0131 624 4183 Photograph: Rettie The Strand is one of the most sought-after streets near Exeter. For sale is this three-bedroom cottage over three floors. Period features include exposed brickwork protected behind a glazed wall in the kitchen, and timber ceiling beams. Engineered oak flooring runs underfoot downstairs. French bay windows look out on to the courtyard garden, which has an area partly covered by a slate roof. This rustic and sheltered nook contains the outdoor kitchen and dining area. The main bedroom has views over the Exe estuary and the Devon countryside. £950,000. Knight Frank, 01392 848 839 Photograph: Knight Frank Behind electric gates is this six-bedroom village house. The Georgian facade is in white render with red-brick additions to the side and behind. Its traditional appearance from the road hides a contemporary rear extension. Through the original front door and beyond the entrance hall are two reception rooms, both with feature fireplaces, bay windows and shutters. The kitchen runs into the extension, which has full-width bifold doors out to a wraparound terrace. The garden looks out to a small paddock and countryside beyond. £1.2m. Fine & Country, 0115 982 2824 Photograph: Fine & Country Within the Stockwell triangle, between Little Portugal, Brixton and Clapham North, is a tree-lined street with a two-bedroom ground-floor flat for sale in a converted Victorian terrace property. The owners have extended it with a side and rear return, which houses the open-plan kitchen-dining-living room. This new space has a partly vaulted ceiling and exposed structural steel beams. The sliding doors open back entirely on to the neat six-metre (20ft) garden, which has a patio and fake grass facing a whitewashed brick wall. £775,000. The Modern House, 0203 795 5920 Photograph: The Modern House This five-bedroom, three-bathroom detached house sits on one of the main thoroughfares of the town, but away from the busy A26. The property has two matching wide openings flanked by concertina doors that give entry to the garden. Wooden steps lead out on to the lawn and several seating areas. The openings divide the open-plan reception room into zones – one denotes the living room area with a TV embedded into shelves, the other the kitchen with a large central island. To the front is a block-paved driveway with an EV charger. £925,000, Savills, 01732 789 700 Photograph: Savills
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A House That Reimagines English Country Style
IN 2017, WHEN the British designer Faye Toogood, already the mother of one, learned that she was pregnant with twins, she found herself craving more space and privacy than life in central London allowed. And so, along with her husband, the broadcaster and writer Matt Gibberd, and their eldest daughter, Indigo, now 12, she moved to the small city of Winchester, in Hampshire, where she'd spent her teens. The family, which soon included the twins Etta and Wren, now 7, lived first in a rental cottage, then in a Victorian garden flat down the road from Toogood's parents. Finally, in 2020 they settled into a two-story Victorian outside of town, eight miles east of Winchester's Norman Gothic cathedral. A country manor whose stucco facade is interrupted by an elegant arched loggia, the house is a departure from the spare, conceptual spaces that the couple always inhabited in London. And, they insist, it was never their intention to live on such a grand scale: The six-bedroom house encompasses 6,500 square feet and sits on five and a half acres. But Toogood, 48 — who, since establishing her namesake studio in 2008, has become well known for her sculptural furniture, modern decorative objects, workwear-inspired clothing and minimalist residential interiors — often leans heavily on intuition as a designer and took a similar approach to house hunting. 'This is the house,' she says, 'that invited us in.' Built in the late 19th century, the slate-roofed mansion sits high above the main road, its crescent-shaped, south-facing lawn giving way to a patchwork of fields and grassland that slope down to the River Itchen on the horizon. It was the picturesque setting that drew Gibberd, 47 — who is the grandson of the English architect and town planner Frederick Gibberd — to the property. 'The view,' he points out, 'is the only thing you can't change.' In remaking the home to suit her family, Toogood also worked from the outside in, first repainting the pistachio exterior a light taupe and then adorning the frontage with pale pink climbing roses. Inside, the goal was to soften the space, which had been stripped of its original finishes by the previous owners and, says Toogood, 'lit up like a football stadium' with recessed fixtures, which they removed. After restoring the moldings and fireplaces — which had been covered up, layered in paint or fitted with modern wood burners — they installed traditional Victorian cast-iron radiators in many rooms, refurbished the sash windows and renovated the kitchen, adding internal glass windows and doors, an Aga stove, Plain English cabinetry and Derbyshire fossil stone countertops. WHEN FRIENDS FROM London visit for the first time, the couple say, they're often taken aback, having expected to find the pared-down interiors that Toogood is best known for designing and that Gibberd has championed with the Modern House, the London-based real estate agency-cum-digital magazine that he co-founded in 2011. Instead they're met with Pierre Frey floral curtains in the dining room, Jean Monro rose fabric on the primary bedroom headboard and botanical chintz armchairs in the sitting room. But Toogood points out that the décor is less a departure than a return: She and Gibberd first met working at The World of Interiors, where they developed an appreciation for print and pattern under the tutelage of the magazine's founding editor, Minn Hogg, an affirmed maximalist. One enters the home through a rectangular foyer, where the walls are papered with a woodland scene that Toogood designed with the Brooklyn-based manufacturer Calico. In the center of the room, a giant glazed 19th-century display cabinet, which once sat in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, holds a collection of antique French plaster mushrooms that Toogood purchased from a friend's father. A life-size Carrara marble sculpture of a coat from the clothing line that Toogood designs with her sister, Erica, stands against the far wall, casting a slightly eerie specter. To the right is the dining room, where the 19th-century French mahogany dining table is surrounded by a set of Gio Ponti Superleggera chairs. Devoid of electric lighting, the room is flooded with sun during the day from the large French doors that open onto the lawn. At night, the egg yolk-hued walls — painted in a custom Farrow & Ball color called Toogood Earth — glow with candlelight during frequent dinner parties with weekend guests. Though Toogood says that she wanted to avoid making the home feel like a showroom, its size made dipping into her archive a necessity. 'This house swallows up furniture,' she says. Near the end of renovations, she filled a truck with pieces, including a crystal version of her signature Roly-Poly chair and one of her hand-carved oak Plot I coffee tables — both of which are now in the sitting room, providing a contemporary counterpoint to the 1960s Holland & Sons sofa and canvas Marcel Breuer club chair, which once belonged to Gibberd's grandfather. In the kitchen, a large space at the back of the house that she lined in reclaimed Staffordshire blue tiles, she placed her Roly-Poly table, a 55-inch round fiberglass pedestal where family dinners — planned by Toogood and mostly cooked by Gibberd — are served. Adjacent to the table is what the family refers to as the Pot Room, a glassed-in area dedicated to the white hand-thrown ceramics that Toogood has amassed over the years, some of them everyday dishes, others prized rarities. It's one of several such collections on display: Brown slipware fills a shelved nook off of the mudroom and, in the Flower Room, which is papered in a Colefax and Fowler seaweed print and hung with 19th-century pressed blooms, there are dozens of white biscuit-fired vases designed by the early 20th-century florist Constance Spry for London's Fulham Pottery. 'I've always made sense of the world through collecting,' says Toogood. 'Living with Matt has refined these collections down, but the disease is still there.' For the girls, the most exciting aspect of their home is upstairs: At the far end of a landing, what appears to be a deep shelf set into the wall and stocked with seashells and pink British lusterware is actually a hidden 'Scooby Doo' door, as they call it, leading to the couple's shared dressing room. To enter, one must hop over an 11-inch-high, 15-inch-deep slab, which — they discovered during renovations — is essentially the structure's central lintel. Like much of the house, it's made from an early form of concrete known as no fines, mixed from fragments of flint and fish bones rather than sand. In the Victorian era, the material was extremely rare, considered the height of innovation. The family's new home, it turns out, was more on brand than they'd initially believed. 'It's irrefutably an English country house,' says Gibberd, 'but it has a real modernity to it.'
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
Skinny but spacious homes for sale in England
Close to the green spaces of Alexandra Palace and Highgate Woods is a quiet residential road of mostly Edwardian housing stock. A dark blue front door leads to stairs to a two-bedroom, upper-floor flat. The light-filled, dual-aspect, open-plan living area consists of a kitchen with marble-top surfaces and an island that overlooks the wooden-floored sitting area with a large period fireplace. The back door leads down spiral stairs to the garden, planted with tropical trees. £695,000. The Modern House, 020 3795 5920 Photograph: The Modern House Nested between two larger Georgian properties is this Grade II-listed home just 3.6 metres wide. The property widens towards the back and once inside its width is quickly forgotten. The decadent interiors scream gothic opulence. The front door opens into the sitting room, which has an oversized fireplace, black wood panelling, and a mural of almost life-size dancers on the wall. Above is the glass-partitioned mezzanine upper floor. There are three bedrooms to choose from after such visual stimulation. £1.15m. Hamptons, 01243 884307 Photograph: Hamptons The village sits on the northern slope of the Yealm estuary in the South Hams region, part of the South Devon area of outstanding natural beauty. This cottage has been refurbished and redecorated in the past two years, including the creation of an open plan kitchen-dining room. Furniture is available via separate negotiation. Newton Ferrers is not a coastal ghost town in the winter but has a buzzing community all year round, with a primary school, a shop, two churches, a chemist, a cafe, three pubs and a yacht club. £499,950. Marchand Petit, 01752 873311 Photograph: Marchand Petit Portland stone steps lead up to the front door of this Grade II-listed, four-storey townhouse built in the 1860s. Replica Victorian tiles cover the entrance-hall floor; from there the grand cantilevered staircase curves up to the five bedrooms on various floors. To the front of the house on the ground floor is the sitting room, and the drawing room is at the back. A drinks cellar, an open-plan kitchen extension and the dining room occupy the lower ground floor. From the top of the house are views of the River Medway. £1.2m. Inigo, 020 3687 3071 Photograph: Inigo This prism-shaped maisonette is full of twists and turns. Up the stairs to the first floor of the apartment is the kitchen and two bedrooms. Up again is the second floor, dominated by the living room, and on top is an orangery and a wraparound roof terrace. This space has chimney pots for company and views of London. The main reception has a trio of south-west facing sash windows and the sculpture-like underside of the exposed staircase structure is very much part of the room. There's a soaking tub in the plush designer bathroom. £850,000. Inigo, 020 3687 3071 Photograph: Inigo
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Brutalist and modernist homes for sale in England
On the eighth and ninth floor of the famous 31-storey Trellick Tower is a two-bedroom apartment for sale. Built in the 1960s, the prominent silhouette is considered a landmark on the west London skyline. The Grade II-listed structure is revered for its access bridges on every third floor and its bush-hammered concrete. The flat itself has a south-facing balcony that spans the entire width of the unit. Westbourne Park underground station (on the Hammersmith and City line) is a seven-minute walk away. £735,000. The Modern House, 020 3795 5920 Photograph: The Modern House Built on an area devastated by bombing during the second world war, on the edge of the Square Mile, is the Barbican Estate – now in its 56th year of occupancy. The brutalist landmark comprises 2,000 homes and includes a cultural centre. There is a two-double-bedroom duplex apartment for sale in the Ben Jonson building. It has a seven-metre (23ft) living area and a balcony, and still boasts its mahogany staircase. Residents of the Barbican also enjoy access to the communal gardens, a 24-hour porter, parking spaces and bike storage. £995,000. Frank Harris, 020 7600 7000 Photograph: Frank Harris & Co This vast brutalist home is set within 2.4 hectares (six acres) of land. Originally a 1930s water reservoir, it was converted in 2009 to make the most of the views which stretch towards the North Downs. The home is mostly on one level with the exception of the glazed pavilion that sits on top. The open-plan living room on the ground floor covers 15 metres (50ft) with a wall of glazing on to the terrace and the outdoor kitchen arranged under the cantilevered roof. There are five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a 25-metre pool. £2.95m. The Modern House, 020 3795 5920 Photograph: The Modern House Between Haggerston Park and Victoria Park is Keeling House, built between 1954 and 1957 to a design by Denys Lasdun, a modernist architect known for his later brutalist buildings – such as the National Theatre and the Royal College of Physicians. The entrance to Keeling House is via a walkway over a water feature and into a glass lobby. On the 10th and 11th floors is a recently renovated apartment with a balcony and two bedrooms, all in a palette of grey poured vinyl floors, green concrete surfaces and brass accents. £725,000. The Modern House, 020 3795 5920 Photograph: French+Tye/The Modern House Skipper House is just south of Norwich city centre and within a short walk of the railway station. There is a three-bedroom penthouse apartment for sale with a wraparound balcony and panoramic views over the city – taking in the castle and cathedral, and countryside beyond. The open plan living-kitchen-dining area has access onto the balcony and has floor-to-ceiling windows; the same goes for the main bedrooms. Underfloor heating runs throughout and there are secure parking spaces under the building. £400,000. Attik, 01603 964 777 Photograph: Attik
