Surrey Homes | SH79 | August 2021 | Adding value to your property supplement inside

This page: When Kim and her husband decided to reconfigure
the layout of the ground floor, they opted for a billiard and
games room in the space that once served as the kitchen,
painting the walls in Farrow and Ball’s Prague Blue
winning interior designer, took in her stride. The
building has been given the interiors equivalent of
a face lift and is now light, bright and welcoming,
a million miles away from medieval darkness.
They started with the black beams and set about sanding
them back to their original oak. “It was a painstaking
job,” says Kim. “And after we’d been at it for about four
and a half months, my father said (as only fathers can),
‘I hate to tell you, but there’s not much difference.’ So
after that we called in the professionals and got all the
beams properly sandblasted.” They are now a wonderful
feature throughout the house. “This area was known
for ship building,” she says. “It’s thought that they were
originally from boatyards and could have been used as
ships’ timbers.” Looking at the huge and very solid pillars
and posts on the landing it’s not hard to imagine this
timber standing up to storms at sea – they appear to be
as strong and solid as they were five hundred years ago.
The previous owners added even more wood to the
oak-framed building – in the form of panelling above the
staircase, which again was dark and Gothic looking, and also
in an oak dividing panel that screens the TV snug from the
wider living area. “I like the Gothic screen,” she says, “but
we painted the panelling on the stairs to make it lighter.”
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