WHERE PAST MEETS PRESENT
A masterful marriage of old and contemporary architecture has transformed a cramped cottage in Suffolk into a modern, rustic home full of light, colour and space
A masterful marriage of old and modern architecture has transformed a cottage into a light, bright space
It looks like a cottage that a child would draw,” says Janey Auchincloss of Grove Cottage, the home she shares with her husband John in Lavenham. A long-time resident of the Suffolk town, she often walked past the house when she was living at Stone Farm, a large property nearby that she and John had given a contemporary makeover. With its pint-sized, rustic charm, Grove Cottage couldn’t be more different, but when Janey and John decided to downsize, it came up for sale at just the right moment.
“Our two daughters had left home and we were rattling around in this huge place with five acres of
land,” remembers Janey, a garden designer whose work has been seen at the Chelsea Flower Show and on ITV, where she co-presented Britain’s Best Back Gardens. “It wasn’t quite that we were emptynesters, we just wanted somewhere cosier. Stone Farm was so big that you’d turn a corner and think, ‘I haven’t been down here for months.’”
Another draw was the cottage’s location in the centre of Lavenham, which Janey loves for its pubs and restaurants, “cathedral-like” church and half-timbered buildings, the legacy of its past as a wealthy medieval wool town. “There’s an eclectic community here, too,” she adds. “Lots of our friends are architects, designers and writers.”
The extensive work they’d done on Stone Farm stood the couple in good stead when it came to renovating Grove Cottage, which contained just a handful of cramped rooms. “It was like stepping back into the 1950s,” Janey says, “but it was immaculate, and had a warm feel. Having worked on a big project before, we knew we could do something with it.”
Lavenham is full of protected landmarks, but the cottage’s relatively young age meant that it
was subject to fewer planning rules. “It was built in 1905 – one of only two Edwardian cottages in the town,” Janey explains. She and John knew they needed to extend – not only to gain space, but also to boost light levels – but they didn’t just want to “build a box on the back”. With this in mind, they approached London architects Project Orange. Its founders James Soane and Christopher Ash are friends of Janey, as she has collaborated with them on several projects already (including The Swan hotel in nearby Southwold). The design sketch they did in the local pub, after a quick look around the cottage, is basically what the couple went with – a linear sequence of rooms that flows seamlessly from the old part of the house, and is flanked by a garden connecting the indoors with the outside. Of the original interior, little remains apart from the outer walls, the restored brick fireplaces (which had been plastered over in the 1960s) and the timber staircase.
The new extension has an open-plan kitchen and dining area, an office and, hidden inside a pod structure, a guest bathroom and utility room. Unlike many similar structures, which languish underused, this one has become the heart of the home. “The joy of this house is that we use all the space,” Janey says. “We love to cook, so we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and I work most days in the office, which is light and bright. Being able to look out onto the garden is wonderful for me as a designer.”
Janey’s artistic background – she originally trained as an illustrator – helped her to forge links between the architecture, interior and garden. The extension’s black steel-framed windows, for instance, inspired a grid layout for the planting, while the robust burnt orange of the masonry and front door – Little Greene’s Drummond shade – pops up again on cushions in the living room. The exterior wood cladding was echoed on the pod, which is covered in floorboards reclaimed from the cottage. “We didn’t want to get rid of everything old,” she says. “And I wanted it to feel earthy and organic.”
Colours are mostly borrowed from nature, including a kingfisher-blue sofa from Swoon and Little Greene’s moody Invisible Green paint, which appears on panelling. This was favoured by the legendary landscape designer Humphrey Repton for garden paintwork. Here, used indoors, it works in harmony with Janey’s beloved botanical elements. She and John have a large collection of treasured possessions, which they’ve built up over the years. “Everything has a memory, whether it’s something from our past life or a gift from friends,” says Janey, who gave pride of place in the lounge to one of her daughter Lucy’s paintings. “You see people buying things
just to create an Instagram image, but I don’t like to rush – eventually you find the right pieces.”
Janey and John have been here only a couple of years, and they’re happy for the house to evolve at its own pace. The garden, in particular, is a work in progress. Janey is experimenting with jungly, evergreen plants such as loquat trees and a “wild and wacky” Tetrapanax papyrifer, or Chinese rice plant, with huge leaves. She has teamed them with reclaimed sandstone and black-brick paths for a look that’s more modern than the average country garden. “I decided that I was going to have fun,” she enthuses. “When designing for clients, it’s more prescriptive. For the first time, I haven’t done a planting plan.”
One thing’s for sure, though – the cottage’s new look has made an impression in the village. It may appear to be a break from tradition, but, in fact, the reverse is true. “During the build, the heritage officer pointed out that, with our permitted development rights, we could have put all kinds of horrible little sheds on the site,” Janey says. “He said he’d rather give us permission to do something different like this, because Lavenham’s known for its unusual buildings. To add a new one for this generation was such a lovely thing to do.”
“I wanted the house to feel earthy and organic”