25 Beautiful Homes May 2021

Space and how we use it – it’s an endlessly perplexing topic. How can we create it, how should we save it, how can we make the most of it? Having lived in her house for some time, Hannah Sherlock (page 14) came to realise that she didn’t need to go ahead with her planned extension, she just needed to use the existing footprint more effectively. On a larger scale, Atalanta Keirle faced the daunting prospect of renovating her vast barn (page 116) and has refigured the dark space into a relaxed home that suits her family’s lifestyle. Equally impressive is designer Marie Soliman’s apartment (page 136), where she has created a flexible living area that accommodates dining, relaxing and working out all in one seamless open-plan room. Whatever challenges…

Simone Hirsch felt like she had opened the door to a secret garden when she first saw her new Cape Town home. The interior designer took in the plane trees, the steep flank of Table Mountain and a biodiversity that she hadn’t encountered in her former city of Johannesburg. ‘I fell in love with the garden first,’ she recalls. ‘The house is situated in a beautiful tree-lined neighbourhood. We knew it would be the perfect place for our two boys to grow up in.’ Simone and her husband, Richard, had decided Cape Town would offer a more fulfilling, outdoorsy life for their sons, Cole, 11, and Conor, eight. ‘The boys can surf or play golf and there’s plenty of hiking, too. The city is less built up than Johannesburg,’ says Simone. The…

As soon as they laid eyes on the property, Hannah and Kieran fell in love with their new family home in Hove due to its generous-sized rooms, high ceilings and enormous garden. ‘Our old home ticked many boxes but it was in a conservation area so our renovation plans were restricted. It would have been too expensive to extend for our growing family,’ says Hannah. DECOR ATING TIP ‘By keeping the walls neutral throughout the house, you can easily mix up your style and colour as often as you like’ When the couple and their two children Paddy, 16, and Esther, 13, moved in, the house needed some major TLC. A top-to-toe makeover started straight away: ceilings were replaced, downstairs floors were sanded and varnished, a new central heating system installed and…

A huge leafy garden tempted Jan Lund and her husband Steve to view a Victorian Cotswold property in the west Oxfordshire countryside. ‘We were actually looking at properties in Cheltenham but a friend who lives in the next village was trying to keep us close by and found the property on the internet,’ says Jan. ‘The interior looked poor, but we liked the idea of the large garden and its period charm and decided to take a look.’ The couple were pleased to find the property still had many of its original features. ‘The layout retained its Victorian style with the reception rooms facing the front lawn, but without an outlook onto the large garden,’ recalls Jan. ‘At the back of the house was a charmingly rustic small kitchen and…

When Polish-Dutch couple Marta and Reinier Bosman first viewed this maisonette flat occupying the first, second and third floors of a Victorian house in northwest London, it had been tenanted for a number of years and it looked decidedly different. ‘What is now the sitting room had been split down the middle to create two bedrooms,’ remembers Marta. ‘The living spaces were on the floor above and there was another bedroom on the top floor, beneath the eaves. For a family with two small children, it really didn’t work for us to have one bedroom so far apart from the others.’ Before the arrival of their children – Elizabeth, now eight, and Gabriel, five – the couple had undertaken an extensive renovation of a flat in east London, and they recognised…

DESIGN TIP ‘We have brought nature indoors with lots of natural materials, such as rattan, wicker and sisal’ Four years ago, Justine and Julien Seven Delon opted to swap their fast-paced life in Paris for a much gentler mode de vie in Provence. ‘We had noticed how much our children, Malo and Elia, loved being surrounded by nature, which had planted the seed of the idea that we might move to the countryside,’ recounts Justine. Then fate intervened when the couple spotted an advertisement for a traditional Provençal farmhouse in the Vaucluse, 40 minutes from Avignon. ‘We fell in love with the photographs of the old stone building with its green shutters, set in a large plot of land with beautiful trees,’ Justine recalls. Ten days later, the couple took the TGV…