LIGHT, NEAT AND TIDY

Extending their Victorian terrace gave Donna Fenby Taylor and her family an open-plan space that’s easy to keep tidy thanks to a secret storage hack

‘We bought this house over eight years ago, moving from a onebedroom flat that we’d extended using Architect Your Home. We were keen to do some build work to add value and put our own stamp on this place. We lived here for eight months, then I found out I was pregnant and my husband was offered a job in Berlin. We rented this property out for four years while we lived out there, putting all our extension plans on hold. When we returned, now with two young children, we knew we definitely needed to start work.

‘The house is on a hill, so the front is higher than the back. It feels a little higgledy piggledy with half-flights of stairs and some quirky features – it had a door that opened up onto thin air from the living room because the garden was another storey below.

‘We enlisted the help of Architect Your Home, doing a loft conversion and adding a bathroom upstairs, and extending downstairs. Our house is in a terrace, so it made sense to extend into the unused stretch of concrete at the side.

The design, tendering and planning permission process took just under a year, then the builders came in. They worked on half of the house at a time, so we decamped first to the living room and later upstairs. I had a makeshift setup in the cellar – my “dungeon kitchen” as I liked to call it.

‘A year on, we spend so much time in this kitchen. I have a secret pantry where I store my cookbooks and the bits of equipment that make the kitchen look messy, and where I can hide from the children. The cork floor is so nice underfoot. When the kitchen’s looking clean and tidy, I think, “This is why we did it.” It was so worth the time and effort.’