January - a move to Margate

Written for and originally published by Homes & Gardens

In the excitement of buying our first house by the sea in Margate, we imagined plans for making our mark on it. What we had overlooked was the seemingly latent stuff which needed removing and disposing of. It seems most interior design projects start with a skip, which is an ignored blight of our industry. Sometimes skips necessarily fill with the rotten and decayed, but too often they are level-loaded because a house ‘needs updating’. We wondered if we could tackle the conversion of our house to a home without a skip. A skip-less renovation would be an achievement, wouldn’t it? 

We began by focussing our grand creative plans through the lens of asking, to what extent can we work with what’s here? Inevitably, even as a skip-less project there would be some trips to the tip, but we could minimise them, repurposing materials or leaving things be, rather than stripping back to a blank canvas which renovators so often do.

We started to plan. Astonishingly, the bulk of the unworthy material was made in this century. The Victorian features still stand strong, while the cracked plastic bath, collapsing kitchen carcasses and bafflingly permeable plastic front door all are destined for landfill or recycling, not just because they look tired and cheap, but because they are functionally failing. It’s an astonishing indictment of modern material culture that the century-and-a-half old fabric and details of a building are outliving the contemporary. As an environmentalist, ripping out a plastic bath and taking it to the tip pains me - if only the previous owners had bought better I wouldn’t be making that trip and adding to a stressed waste system. As I drive back from the recycling centre, I am making promises to myself that the future owners of our house won’t have to do the same.

So how do we make sure the things we add to our house last? The answer to this tricky question has to look beyond physical longevity - the vinyl grey wood-effect floor in the kitchen probably had another couple of decades left in it physically, apart from the trip-hazard tears by the utility, and parts of that roll of plastic will sadly still exist in centuries time. What it lacked from the moment it was printed is aesthetic longevity, or the ability to develop any kind of what the academic Jonathan Chapman calls ‘emotional durability’ with its owners. It may have once suited or mimicked a style or trend, but trends by definition only contain meaning on a few magazine pages. It might have once been relevant for a short period, but now is an homogenous, meaningless floor cover, selected only for its cheapness and present acceptability to the previous owner. Knowing there were original Victorian pine boards underneath, we couldn’t keep it. As I pulled it and its cardboard underlay up, I felt I was mining for meaning. 

We’ve settled on a plan for our project which will be shaped around the themes of integrity, repairability and truth to materials. We are upholding the integrity of the original house by preserving and restoring its original features, making a point of patching the plumber-damaged floors with expressed crafted care, for example. Everything we’re adding will be designed with the same emotional durability that the house possesses, but it will also be entirely re-purposable. The kitchen, for example, will have solid wood doors which can be repaired or reused or should retain enough value to be sold if necessary. The one modern feature which was made from solid material was a thin marble fire surround added around a 1970’s electric fireplace in the living room. We carefully removed and have re-used this in our bathroom, learning to cut and work stone to do so, in a way I hope the future owners may re-work our solid fixtures and fittings.

Nothing will be extravagant in expense, but purposeful in effort, as we’re making as much as possible ourselves from inexpensive materials in weekends and evenings, in the house.

This gives us a brief to make bold statements or take risks with colour on surfaces that can be easily reversed, like walls or solid furniture, but to be extremely considered when adding to the fabric of the building. Sometimes, the prospect of having a whole house to ‘do up’ can be daunting, but we’ve given ourselves a brief that will be fun to work within, but that which serves the needs of future owners, and our environment. With another new baby due this Spring, this tight brief well help us focus!