Wealden Times | WT224 | Nov & Dec 2020 | Christmas supplement inside

This page: A colourful guest
bedroom is filled with artworks
collected on the couple’s travels
breast, you watch telly from the comfy
grey sofa with your head turned away
from the woodburner – while your
body still benefits from the warmth.
It is a great improvement on the very
unappealing TV-fixed-to-the-wall over
the mantelpiece, which is becoming all
too commonplace in today’s homes.
“We didn’t want the TV to be the
focal point,” says John, very simply
– summing up their very independentminded
approach to the entire house.
This is immediately evident in the
hallway outside the sitting room,
where a downstairs loo has been
very cleverly sneaked in under the
stairs, so you would never know it
was there. To the right as you come
out of it, opposite the front door, is
another hidden space, where they
hide away coats, hats and boots.
John’s lateral-thinking engineer brain
is behind these very pleasing details,
making the absolute most of every bit
of space in the house, without ever
compromising the overall aesthetics.
This is very clear with their approach
to bathrooms. They didn’t want a shared
‘family’ bathroom, so instead in both
the guest bedrooms on the top floor,
they have shaved off a narrow strip
of space to create very contemporary
shower rooms, opposite the beds – not
that you’d know they were there.
By making them slim spaces, the
width of the room, they don’t create
that painful en suite bathroom effect
you sometimes see, with a corner of a
room carved off. Here the proportions
of the space are not damaged at
all and because the ceiling slopes
down in a curve at that end of
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