MAXIMALISE!

YOUR INTERIORS WITH THE HELP OF THE MODERN HOUSE

Yes! The seasons are turning! And here come the classic markers of spring. The boughs heave with blossom, flowers burst from gardens, birds trill in cheerful song and estate agents’ signs pop up along the pavements, hoping to attract the potential home buyers as they emerge, sleepy and discombobulated, from their winter hibernation. This year, however, there will be a new agency sign for the keen-eyed to spot. Inigo is a start-up that focuses on selling “historic” properties, and it comes from the team behind The Modern House, Britain’s most desirable and discerning estate agency. Like The Modern House, praised by this very publication for “rewriting the rulebook” of its industry, you can expect Inigo to ruffle a few feathers.

“Albert and I have had so many thoughts about expanding over the years and this is the one that kept coming back to the top of the agenda,” says Matt Gibberd, who co-founded The Modern House with Albert Hill in 2005, “and I suppose conceptually it’s such a simple way for us to have a much broader effect on the market.” While The Modern House specialises in contemporary homes that favour the clean lines and simplicity of modernist principles — as those among its 420k

Instagram followers, the largest following of any UK estate agency, will already know — Inigo will focus on period properties with a somewhat different feel (though likely just as IG-friendly).

“It feels like, aesthetically, we’re starting down more of a maximalist route at the moment. Pattern and colour and decoration: they’re very much back in the consciousness,” says Gibberd. “We wanted to create a brand that reflected that, but also was a dose of optimism in these straitened times.”

And can lockdown take some of the credit/ blame? “Yeah, I think so,” he says. “There are predictions that there’ll be the return of peacocking

in fashion, that sort of outward display, because people have been so cooped up, and I suspect in their homes it will be the same thing.”

The first batch of Inigo listings went live last month, and included a Grade II-listed manor house surrounded by its own double-moat, a painter’s five-bedroom farmhouse dating back to 1750, and a Victorian villa spread across 8,000sq ft. But as for what makes a property right for Inigo to sell, Gibberd says they’re keeping the brief deliberately broad: “It might be a listed building, or one with honest, well-constructed architectural detailing, or it might be about the quality of the interior, or the fact that it really represents the passions and personalities of the people that live there. You know, does it have a story to tell?”

Gibberd, who is currently writing a book about The Modern House’s design principles due to be published in the autumn, says he’s been surprised by the numbers of young people who have “latched onto the English country house style, but who have mashed it up in a contemporary way”. He describes the look as “Colefax and Fowler meets Cocteau” and cites young interior designers like Luke Edward Hall, Duncan Campbell and Beata Heuman as leading the charge.

But does the launch of Inigo mean that modernism is on the wane again? Could we be seeing the end of the clean white box? “Oh god, no no no,” he says. “If you look at a Georgian house, it’s about the quality of the spaces, and the way it harnesses the natural light, and the connection to nature, or the materiality of an old flagstone floor or a wooden handrail. Those are the same things that carry through to the best modern buildings. If something is a good example of what it is, then it will also have value and always be of interest. It’s as simple as that.” inigo.com