Surrey Homes | SH21 | July 2016 | Interiors supplement inside

Above: The light-filled kitchen once had an unreliable old Aga at its heart – since replaced by a range cooker. The kitchen units are by Howdens and are
complemented by light, machined-oak floorboards. Martine and Andrew are big fans of the artist Bella Pieroni whose pictures hang to the right of the cooker
We all know the moment. Your last tenner’s riding
confidently on red 19 – and the ball trips neatly
over it and drops with an infuriating little
smirk into zero. You, of course, have nobody but yourself
to blame. You paid your money and you made your choice.
But imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if you
had not only no control over where the ball landed but
not even where you placed your chips. Imagine that and
you’ll get some idea of what it’s like to be your house.
For a house, life is one big, eternal gamble with the odds
stacked all over the place. It cannot choose where it lives,
it cannot choose its neighbours and it cannot choose its
owners. The latter, must be particularly galling. Each time
it goes up for sale, its whole future rides on who finally
walks through that front door, keys proudly in one hand
and architect’s drawings and colour swatches in the other.
It’s a tricky moment. Sometimes, as we all know, it
works out well, but as we also know, sometimes the ball
rockets with frightening accuracy straight into the zero.
Just occasionally, very occasionally, the gods smile
down and a house hits the jackpot. Churchwood is
just such a house.
For some years, its owners Martine and Andrew
Laughland had adopted a live-and-let-live arrangement with
the 17th Century cottage which probably suited the latter
fine. But a couple of years ago the couple took a long hard
look at their home and decided that a major renovation
was well overdue. The house’s luck lay in the fact that the
couple run not only one of Britain’s leading fabric houses,
Design Forum, but one of Europe’s best Alpine chalet
interior design companies, Laughland Jones. Not only
could the couple draw on their own considerable design
expertise but a wealth of furnishings both of their own and
those of their favourite designers and suppliers.
“The cottage hadn’t really had much done to it since
Andrew first moved in and it still had something of
the bachelor pad about it,” says Martine. “It was time
for a major rethink of how we wanted to live.” The
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