An interiors project that became a remaking of the whole house.

The Old Manse came to us as an interior design brief — colour, kitchen, finishes — but as soon as we began drawing the existing layout, it was clear the house was holding the clients back. The entry was tight and low. The stairs were where the daylight should have been. The garden, behind the house and worth looking at, was barely visible from inside.

So the brief grew. The existing front porch came out, and a new door — flush with the internal walls of the hallway, with glazing so the daylight reaches further into the house — replaced it. Inside, walls came down to open up the ground floor, and we moved the stairs to a position that made the plan finally make sense.

The new staircase is a designed object in its own right: exposed steelwork in the industrial register the clients responded to. From the new staircase landing, a large opening in the rear wall now gives the garden a frame; the glazing puts the planting and the light right at the centre of the house.

The kitchen is the heart of the project. We designed it to sit comfortably in the deep colours and dark joinery the clients loved, with brass pendants overhead and a long timber-topped island. It was built by my long-time friend Nigel Wilson at Auspicious Furniture in Stroud — collaboration with a maker we know and trust always raises the standard, and the clients ended up very happy with the result.