Surrey Homes | SH38 | December 2017 | Health & Beauty supplement inside

This page: A house of many levels
– some of the rooms throughout
the house are accessed by runs of
stairs and steps, especially up to
the bedrooms in the roundels
the floors.” They made an offer and have not looked back.
The oast house was originally part of a group of three
houses: the mill house, the oast and the farmhouse.
“There’s a round oast and a square oast here,” Kali
explains. “We do our best with the curving walls and
love the quirkiness. I don’t buy specially made curved
furniture, but I choose furniture carefully so that it will
fit the space.” The downstairs roundel has become the
family’s library and is lined with bookcases. “It’s amazing
how many books it takes to fill a library,” laughs Kali.
“We thought we had a lot of books – we are both avid
readers, but we haven’t come close to filling it.”
The kitchen was the first space that they renovated,
keeping the original shape and layout, but updating the
cupboards and adding an all important island unit. “We
live in the kitchen and living room,” says Kali, adding
“I keep the tv in a cupboard, so that it’s not on display
all the time, which means that if the children don’t see
it they don’t immediately think about it, so they go and
do other things.” A clever trick, that. Other than these
two rooms I suspect that some visitors might choose
to spend their time in Kali’s laundry. “It is the envy of
all who survey it,” she laughs. “It has an extra drinks
fridge, a wall of cupboards, a work bench for wrapping
presents – and there’s still lots of space for our masses of
laundry. I feel like this sort of room is a bit American.”
From the look of it we need more of these in England.
“We are slow to do things in the house,” says Kali. “There
are still things that haven’t been finished after seven years. We
do it in dribs and drabs and things change. One thing we did
do after a couple of years was to put in a new floor on the
ground floor and we insulated under the floorboards. It
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