For some, the idea of creating a home from scratch may seem daunting, but for former costume designer Gina Portman, building anew allowed her to make the move to the countryside she’d long wanted. Having left London with her family almost 18 years ago for the coastal town of Rye, Gina hankered for something a little more rural and when a plot came up just three miles away in the east Sussex countryside, it provided just the spot to create a contemporary barn-like house. Here, she talks to us about how her ideas found form and why she can never quite commit to furnishing the space.Gina: “I grew up in north London, but I’d always wanted my children to experience the countryside growing up. We moved to Rye in 2002 and lived on a hill in a 19th-century house, with high ceilings and a huge staircase. It was beautiful, but it was near a main road and I wanted to be in the countryside.
“My husband, Andrew, said he’d only move if we could build our own house. One day, I was out cycling in the middle of nowhere and saw a for-sale sign at the end of a bridleway, which led to a really broken-down farmworkers bungalow. It was beyond saving, but the location, surrounded by fields, was hard to beat. It wasn’t overlooked by any other houses and the only traffic was horse-riders. “Nothing particularly appealed to me about building from scratch, but I liked the idea of living in the middle of nowhere. I went home and told Andrew, and I think he was too embarrassed to say he was only joking about doing a new-build. We ended up putting an offer in! “Andrew loves concrete brutalist architecture, but we couldn’t do that here as it’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the house had to reflect the local vernacular. We worked with England Architecture, which is run by Nick and Rosamund England, who were friends of friends and based between Rye and south London. As far as we knew, they’d never designed a home before, but they had always wanted to. We took a bit of a punt and it turned out really well in the end.
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发表于 2020-11-6 16:08:13
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