Inside a Beautiful Home in the Cotswolds by Architect Tom Gresford

Hello Luxury Home Show, I'm Tom Grieford of Grieford Architects. I would love to show you around the house that we've built here on the edge of the Cotswolds. When we bought the house there were 16 western red cedar trees. We cut them down, milled them and clad the house in them. So that wood that the house is clad in was grown right here. These really strong areas of colour, they come from in particular this book of Japanese kimono colours. So this is a selection of colours for a kimono. This is the one that we chose because it's May, our favourite month. We wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and just look out at empty open countryside. Before I take you inside and have a look around this house, I just want to tell you a bit about it because it's quite an interesting project and something we feel really, really passionately about as architects is not rebuilding where you don't have to. So this house was a bungalow and the bungalow is still there. All we've done is extended upwards the first floor bit and re-clad it and insulated. The footprint of the house is exactly as it was. The windows even we have kept. The playroom window, the kitchen window, which is the middle window, was the original kitchen window and we wanted to minimise the change to the existing structure. So we minimised the amount of embodied carbon that we were just demolishing and getting rid of. So that was the kind of basic idea and when you look at original pictures of the bungalow, you can see immediately that this house is that house. That also creates a really unique architecture because you don't have endless things you can do. You have to work with what you've got and I think that's what gives this house a really unique character. Phoebe and I are both architects. Every house that we've owned we've done a project to but this one's a bit different. So I was born in Australia. Phoebe spent much of her early life in Hong Kong and then spent time in her 20s in Japan and what we wanted to do was bring a bit of those influences to this house. As I show you round, you'll see bits of Australia, bits of Hong Kong, bits of Japan and how we've tied them into a contextual house for the Cotswolds. Phoebe and I spent our early working life in London and our children were both born in London where we did our first projects together and when we moved out of London we wanted a house which we could really play with and where the children could have space to be free and run around in a big garden and also a village community. So the lovely thing about this village is it's a dark streets village. There's no street lights. So we've got a really really tight community and the children do still play out in the kind of way that people talk about in the 1950s. The kids will go off on bike rides together. That's the childhood that we wanted them to have and that was the background to us kind of moving out of London, moving to the country and creating this house. This is the entrance hall and the whole house radiates out from this space. One of the things that was really important for us was that we didn't change any of the structural openings on the ground floor because those represented high levels of embodied carbon. So when we moved the front door we had to move it to an existing opening and so we moved it to another window. So you're walking through what was once a bathroom window. As we go through you'll see there's this really strong access from the front door through the main living space into the sitting room beyond and it's deliberate that you also don't see out from here. We wanted to draw you in so you came in, experienced the space and then saw the reveal of the views. Come in. This is the main kitchen, dining and living space. There's some really important details about how we both arranged the house and the principle of what we wanted to do with this house. So over here you've got this absolutely incredible view. Previously the house faced south which is over there. This is north which is not an ideal orientation for a low energy house because you want to get as much solar gain from the sun as you possibly can. With this house it's kind of facing the wrong way but we still had to embrace this incredible view. Where I'm standing now there used to be an old plastic conservatory. The entire footprint of the house apart from this space is exactly as it was before so you can then read that in the way we've used flooring. We've got this lovely porcelain floor here which gives way to the wood of the outdoor space and so this space is conceived as just being part of outside and in order to kind of really reinforce that what we did was we pulled the timber cladding which is cedar. A really interesting story behind the cedar. So when we bought the house there were 16 western red cedar trees and what we did was we cut them down, milled them and clad the house in them. So that wood that the house is clad in was grown right here, metres from where it is. So it's a really really lovely way of tying the house and the design of the house to the site to go back how we kind of use this room. The idea was to wrap the cedar on the roof here. As soon as you step from here over to here you suddenly feel like you're outside and with this huge pane of fixed glazing you're right in the landscape all the time and there's this idea, I think it's a Japanese idea actually, of borrowed landscapes. So drawing the landscape into your own property or your own space and so we've got this incredible kind of 40 mile view over there. In order to pull that right up to the house we then planted right up to the glazing here so we've got this lovely informal almost forest-like planting here which sits right next to where you're living, talking, reading, drinking a cup of coffee. Another really interesting thing is you'll notice the bookshelves are built into the wall and that's because externally there's a huge amount of insulation that allowed us to then set these bookshelves right into the wall and you'll notice even the way we've kind of detailed around the bookshelves relates the way we've detailed around the outside of the windows so those things are then tied together internally and externally. In the middle of the space is the dining table. Now for me the dining table is the most important piece of furniture in the house. It's where everyone gathers whether it's having breakfast or painting, model making, having dinner, the dining table is and should be both notionally and physically at the heart of the home. The other really lovely thing is that where the table is now is where the old dining room was in the bungalow and the same applies to the kitchen. The kitchen itself is in exactly the same location as it was in the old bungalow and we did this partly for practicality but also partly because it ties in with the history of the building even though it's not a very old building still a building with a history so that kitchen sink is in exactly the same place as the kitchen sink was before. The window is in the same place as it was before. The practical side of this is that the island then looks over the dining space over the living space to the views beyond. I'm a really really passionate believer in sociable cooking. I love cooking. I love being able to talk to people as I stand here cooking. I want to be able to talk people at the table there but then there's this other element which is that the kitchen window looks at the drive so you can see your guests arriving, the children coming back from a bike ride, Amazon coming with a delivery. There's a really practical element to the way this room is arranged and also the final thing is that you get morning light here. In the summer the light pours into this room as you're preparing your breakfast so there are a few really neat hidden details in this kitchen. One of them the tea and hot chocolate station so you'll notice there's teas on that side hot chocolates on that side and then various appliances which are all plugged in there so all you need to do is choose what you want to do and pull it out you don't have to worry about plugging it in and then just goes back and down the shelf comes again. A couple of other really nice little details one of which I love is a super practical small fridge. This isn't our big fridge it's just milk, butter, day-to-day things so they're always at hand and then a really neat detail that Phoebe came up with is the three sinks so rather than having a draining board with all your washing up part on the side you wash here you rinse here and you drain in that sink which means that any time of the day you come in here you don't just have piles it's all neatly set below. Very good for people popping around unexpectedly and then the last thing which we love and this comes from our old the farmhouse we lived in before we love having a pantry. This door then reveals pantry with big fridge freezer there so that's all the cold stuff lives. Behind the door we've got open pantry shelving behind that we've got a really cool feature which is a slide that goes from the children's bedrooms on the first floor down to their playroom. Now obviously if you've got loads of children flying down the slide what's going to happen is the shelves that are attached to the slide are going to relinquish all their jars and their cans and things so in order to stop the chickpeas flying off the shelves as the children were flying down the slide what we did was we created a 100 millimetre gap between the two so however hard the children are coming down the slide or even the adults to be honest the cans of food and the packets of food all stay happily on their shelves. So you may have noticed as we walk around the house there are these really strong areas of colour and I'm going to talk a bit more about them as we as we walk around but basically each area of panel colour relates to a function so you're actually in the green functional zone which includes the pantry and the colours come from and were inspired by Phoebe's time in Japan and actually they come from in particular this book of Japanese kimono colours so this is a selection of colours for a kimono if you're designing a kimono you'd come to this book you'd pick a colour range and this is the one that we chose because it's it's May our favourite month and you'll see at the beginning we've got the pink there we actually took this book to a paint manufacturer and got them to colour match the exact colours in this book so the colour that you're standing in the moment is that green there. I hope that made kind of a bit of sense then we had some fun because we're really lucky to have lots of bits and pieces of art including amazing works by my father-in-law such as this painting of mouldy fruit and this Banksy here which I was lucky enough to buy 20 odd years ago and what that allowed us to do was look at the bits of art that we have and then match them to the coloured wall so you'll see that as you walk around the colours of the walls and the works of art that sit on them are kind of really closely related. Yeah this Banksy I'm really lucky to have this probably 21-22 years ago I was in Columbia Road Market in East London and there were these prints and I don't think we really knew who Banksy was he definitely wasn't very high profile at the time and anyway there are these prints I bought one so behind the pink wall the pink panelling is our music room and sitting room. This room is quite interesting because it's the only original room from the original bungalow the rest of the house has been completely rearranged internally we've then got two fixed pane windows one south and one facing north where the French windows used to be and then we've got one opening window here so you'll notice where windows don't have to open we've completely hidden the frame and that means that you get the most of the view all of you but you still have one window for ventilation. Talking of being warm this house is designed to the Enerfit standard. Now Enerfit is the passive house standard for retrofit and it means that this house actually has no heating system. In order to achieve that we've made the house incredibly airtight and then we have extracts throughout the house which draw the hot stale moisture ridden air out of the house put it through the heat exchanger and then reintroduce it so you have constant amount of fresh air and the heat is trapped in the house and the heat is created not just by the sun although the sun coming through the windows creates a lot of heat but it is by your daily activity just walking around you're creating heat the cat creates heat the oven creates heat. Heat has always been generated in this house so there's this really seamless link between the internal living space and the external living space it means that you can use this all year round even on a really chilly day like today you can sit out here having a cup of tea enjoying this incredible view also being connected with whatever's happening inside the house and certainly in the summer when you're having a barbecue out here on the deck this whole space just becomes one. I'm back in the entrance hall now and back onto the topic of colours so what you'll see throughout the house are these blocks of colour and the blocks of colour all contain functional spaces so this particular orange block contains the utility room and entrance storage we've got the green block that we were in before which contains the pantry but also the stair and the slide and then this block here the dark blue block has the downstairs blue. As you move around the house your enjoyment and experience of the space is constantly changing because the colour and the relationship between the different colour and you is constantly changing. This is the children's playroom the most important feature of which is the slide and I'm going to show you that in just two seconds as you look beyond the green panelling out to the orange of the utility and functional space here and the blue of the downstairs loo what that means is that you're never just applying a random colour to a wall the colours have meanings and their relationships have different meanings so you're constantly experiencing the house in a different way. I'm going to show you the slide I'm going to have to disappear upstairs. God that's unpleasant. One thing which is really important to know about the slide is it's incredibly scary but it's also exactly what our children wanted it's dark and fast and now we're going to move through to the more private parts of the downstairs in fact as you go through you'll notice that another one of the colours starts revealing itself and that's this green which is storage boxes that make the study and the spare room that I'm going to show you in a minute. This is our study and one of the things I've told you about the house one of the things I love about the house is the idea that you get the view in different ways from different spaces so when we're sitting here at our desks and actually Phoebe has the best view that's because she gets less distracted you'll see we have a completely different view than the one we have in the sitting room but yeah this is our study it's also the space where I play loud music as much as I possibly can when I'm not being told not to and when it's not too so I've got decks records that sort of stuff but also our main workspace and then behind you just lots and lots of storage which is super useful what everyone wants as we come around on the other side of this green box and we come into this really private tucked away guest bedroom and the idea of having this guest bedroom down here with the study next door and its own private bathroom here is actually this could become its own little annex if it was ever required so you could have a bedroom here with a living room there and the bathroom in there so this window seat allows our guests a little private place to sit and get away from the noise and the hubbub of life staying with us and it's a perfect place to sit and read and look out at this just incredible view the idea of the desk as well is that you've got a little private writing place whether it's a guest or one of us wants to be on a call or just do a little bit of private work we've got this lovely little nook which runs through to the window here it's a lovely place to sit and work one of my favorite little views is this view up through the slot window here where you can look all the way up the side of the house and the porch to the drive one of the other things about it is you'll notice a little blank panel at the bottom this is not a mistake this was going to be our cat flap space but he's now so geriatric that he can't use a cat flap so it's just a blank panel and so lastly in this guest suite is this little bathroom this is my favorite view of the house it's the back we talked about how the house is clad in timber which came from this very plot and here you can see this beautiful silvery cedar that was grown just behind me meters behind me i just love the fact that when i look at this house i know that it's clad in material that came from this very plot the other thing i love is this long line of the veranda which links and ties together the internal sitting room the garden room and the veranda there and you can see then the planting stepped up and that's what i mentioned was the idea of bringing the landscape in by planting right up to the house and this beautiful glazed wall that allows you to sit inside and be outside at the same time a few more technical things to notice you'll see a big solar array up there that is connected to a battery that sits in the house meaning that in the summer we can be completely energy independent and even with two electric cars we can charge them during the day because we get so much power from this beautiful solar array and then you can also just up there see the mvhr this is a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery unit this is what allows the house to stay warm and trap all that hot air inside whilst it being freezing cold outside inside the house is this incredible view the reason we bought the house the reason we've created the house in the way we have and if you look behind me here you just see this endless landscape that stretches beyond us and that's what pulls your eye when you're inside when you're at the hob whether you're sitting down or at the dining table whether you're in our bedroom or in the spare bedroom or at a desk your eye is always drawn towards this incredible landscape beyond us so as we come up the stairs you'll see that this space is really dark it's really really dramatic it's the green of the box downstairs and we wanted this space to feel like a real contrast to everything else in the house the other cool thing up here is the entrance to the slide behind you is the master suite and we'll take you there in just a couple of minutes first i'll show you the children's bedrooms so we've got two children's bedrooms they're both the same exactly the same footprint to stop arguments both of the kids bedrooms have really lovely fixed windows here which allow them to enjoy the view and um you know they've made a real effort to make them nice and tidy so these rooms have the most incredible height they have this incredible feeling of space which is a real contrast to downstairs and in order to make the most of that what we've done is created two mezzanine play areas this one is over their bathroom in the other bedroom it's over our dressing room and this means that although the footprint of the room isn't huge down here it actually extends up there the other lovely thing about both mezzanine play areas is they have little windows into the hall so the children can talk to each other from either side and also fire nerf guns at us as we're walking up the stairs you missed so this is the children's bathroom and the main feature of this bathroom is this big full width high level window this high level window means you can shower get dressed change whatever you want in this room in complete privacy whilst also not having the amazing sky and trees beyond obscured so this is our master bedroom suite and you enter through the dressing room with drawers on one side and wardrobes on the other side and then you come a bit further through and to our ensuite bathroom I'm a really strong believer that the bathroom should not be entered directly from the bedroom so you have some privacy between the two rooms but yeah here we have our bath in this lovely vaulted bathroom space with a roof light above us you see the evening lights coming through from the west and in the morning we get the eastern light there so whether you're bathing in the morning or the evening you get direct sunlight into this room behind me we have a big walk-in shower and then built-in cabinetry there so we have a high level window in the dressing room this means that we have complete privacy when we come out of our bathroom getting dressed but we can still also see the view the sky trees get the sun in it's perfect so the end of the route the journey through the house is this our master bedroom we position this room here because it takes in the breathtaking views that we have and we wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and just look out at empty open countryside one of the problems of this was that the view is to the north but we both like waking up to morning sun so behind me we've got an east-facing roof light with a remote control blind which means that when we wake up in the morning we just press a button and sunlight floods into our room the view from here is the most special in the house it is absolutely endless and it is changing constantly second by second hour by hour day by day and we can never get tired of it sometimes we just sit here and look at it whether it's raining sunny snowy windy whatever it is it's an incredible view and it's what the whole house is about behind me just in case i do get sick of it there's this lovely little juliet balcony and door which allows us to stand and actually lean out into the landscape as well and this has completely different views over the rolling hills and fields to the side of the house a very different landscape to the thames floodplain beyond thanks luxury home show thanks for coming along and i hope you enjoyed the tour if you'd like to see more from grief at architects just follow the link below see you later hi luxury home show i'm sarah southwell i'm an interior designer this is my 16th century manor house in somerset come on in and have a look i like things that are original and authentic this house is full of things like that