Wealden Times | WT208 | June 2019 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Left: The holiday let Below: The original master
bedroom’s en suite features
a deep antique French marble bath
The result is the kind of professional polish you see
throughout the house, with the glamour of the headboard
and bedside lamps in the form of dramatic white pendant
lights by Flos, set off by the original old bricks and wooden
beams – with another old large scale stone fireplace
and a carved stone corbel adding antique drama.
With the old part of the house – and the earlier part of
the Pfeiffer family history – fully explored, it was time to
head through glass double doors in the kitchen to the new
extension, designed by MHD Architects, based in Ringmer.
The first space you hit is the funky luxe sitting room
which forms a link between the two parts of the house. A
minimalist modern staircase sweeps up to the right and there
are glass walls on both sides, looking out to the elegantly
planted garden at the front, with an outdoor dining area and
a carp pond, and to the back onto a dramatic gabion wall.
Gabions are those wire cages filled with rocks that are used
to shore up the bare earth when they build motorways. Here
they are filled with limestone from Rye Harbour, holding up
the hill they dug into behind the house – which they had to
do to get light pouring into the extension from both sides.
This has created a very cool feature that provides a pleasing
contemporary counterpoint to the original flint garden wall,
which you can see through the glass wall on the other side.
The ground-level paved walkway between the gabions and
the back glass wall has logs stored in bays, a tree in a pot and
a Georgia O’Keeffe-style animal skull (from Martin
Johnson in nearby Seaford) on the wall. At first-floor
level, there are two wooden bridges leading from
the upstairs landing, across the void to a decking
area with outdoor seating and dining areas.
It’s very cool and industrial looking, fitting perfectly
with the practical agricultural use of the original
building, and the rough natural textures set off the
luxurious Pfeiffer Design soft furnishings inside here,
just as the old bricks do in the master bedroom.
The formal sitting room – although that doesn’t seem
a groovy enough word for it – has a very LA feel,
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