Built on a beautiful site with Geedon Creek and the Colne Estuary to the south across fields in the background, the house was for a young family with two girls, who wanted privacy on a tight budget (originally three bedrooms). After the husband died, years later, the new owners applied for permissions to make changes, quite out of cinq with the spirit of the original and were turned down.

The current owners had two Bedrooms added by a local Practice (very sympathetically) and in 2014 I was asked to re-design an earlier ground floor Garden Room and join in an upgrade of insulation and other sustainable improvements. The original house with Kitchen fittings, cupboards and bathroom furniture remain substantially as they were built in 1964. It makes me wonder, even if the worktop was teak, whether sustainability is really as simple as current dogma makes out – there would have been four or five IKEA or HOMEBASE replacements in those fifty-four years!

Contractor: Mark Andras
Photographs: Nick Read