Your life made easier - every day. 25 Beautiful Homes is a magazine for readers with a sense of personal style. Aspire to your dream house and enjoy looking at other people's homes, designs and styles for inspiration.
I find this month’s cover story very inspiring (page 60). I love the beautiful decorative mural in the dining area and am impressed by the spatial wizardry in the sitting room (a Crittall screen sections off a snug TV zone). It’s a home packed full of ideas. But it is much richer than just that. Riddhi and Mick’s story brings colour and context to an interesting design. It really is hard to imagine that this London new build was a plain white box when they bought it. Here at 25 Beautiful Homes we hope to offer you much more than straight-up projects every month. The homes we share are all a reflection of the owners’ personalities. Take the boho pad of Peggy Bell and her partner, Phil, as another example…
Eager to leave her native city of Belfast for the coast, Peggy Bell went to view a Victorian terrace in Bangor with her partner Phil. ‘It was love at first sight,’ she says, ‘but it was out of our price range and I wondered if it was too good for the likes of me.’ But negativity isn’t in Peggy’s vocabulary. ‘I’m a Law of Attraction convert, so I set about getting myself in the right mindset. I attuned myself to the house – every night I visualised living there.’ Sure enough, just before Christmas 2015, Peggy and Phil, together with their children Sia, five, and Ben, three, moved into their new home. For Peggy, the first few months in the seafront house was spent perusing Pinterest for home decor inspiration…
Moving to the Cotswolds from Bristol, architect Lydia Robinson and her husband, project manager Lawrence Grigg, wanted a property that they could get their teeth into. ‘One of the reasons we moved here was to be nearer where my horse, Mandela, was stabled, but we also love the countryside and just fancied a change. Our design practice, Design Storey, is based in Cheltenham, so the Cotswolds is an easy commute.’ And, when the couple spotted a well-built 1950s two-bedroom house online, they could see it had enormous potential. ‘It was right in the middle of a quarter-acre corner plot and we knew we could make huge improvements,’ says Lydia. ‘It had been decorated in a typical country style, with carpet and floral fabrics, which weren’t very us. But the basic…
Emma Scrase was searching for a property she could afford on her own when a friend mentioned a newly built townhouse in her local area. On her first viewing, Emma was pleasantly surprised by the generous size of the plot and immediately recognised the potential to extend to the rear in the future. ‘I relished the thought of gradually putting my own stamp on the house,’ she recalls. After moving in, Emma’s first job was to have the garage converted into a therapy room for her beauty business, but she took her time in planning how the rest of the house might eventually look. Three years later and married to Gary, the arrival of their daughter Megan, now 10, meant more flexible family living space had become a priority. Following…
Expanses of shag carpet and an avocado bathroom suite are not top of every house-hunter’s wish list. But for Sarah and Ed Burgess, the raw state of this Thirties house presented a great opportunity – even with its time warp decor. When they bought it, the ground floor was a cramped patchwork of small rooms. But on the upside, it also had a large attic space that was ripe for converting, was in a great location and came with a longed-for garden. As an architect – his practice is Burgess Architects – Ed could envisage ways to make this bland, boxy house into something more inspiring for himself, his wife Sarah and their children Clive, 16, Nell, 14, and Ralph, 11. Sarah and Ed kicked off their redesign by agreeing…
When Julie Light gave up her career in human resources to become a glass sculptor, she also had to change her home. ‘I owned a Victorian terrace in London, but when I decided to become an artist I needed a kiln,’ she explains. ‘I wanted a studio in the city but everything was too expensive, so I had to find a house with room to build a kiln in the garden.’ Julie realised she would have to look further afield and followed a friend’s advice to extend her search into Surrey. ‘It was difficult to find a big garden without a large house attached, which I had no need of,’ she says. In June 2014, Julie viewed a former Baptist chapel in a village in Surrey. ‘The estate agent said…
