Kitchen/Garden room & new
first floor bathroom above

This delightful 17^th Century, late Tudor, listed terrace house in the Conservation area of Bury St Edmunds was done for close friends of Marilize.  The house had a very small and dark ground floor kitchen and an even darker small, lean to bathroom with very low ceilings. The bathroom extension was a later edition and did not do the cottage any favours.  The garden to the back is rather small with no access and 2 meter garden walls to both sides.  The planning permission and listed building consent took more than a year to be finalised, but we came up with very simple solutions that satisfied the conservation officer, the planners, the neighbours and the clients.

One of the biggest challenges, as with most ancient building conversions, was to achieve enough head height under the existing ceilings to allow for a comfortable contemporary lifestyle. As with most successful designs, we came up with a very simple solution, lowering the ground floor area substantially. We pushed the back wall out into the garden and installed two large French doors to create an open plan kitchen and garden room with plenty of space and light, whilst preserving the integrity and history of the existing building.  We created a downstairs WC under the staircase and a family bathroom with French doors to look out onto the well-designed cottage country garden on the first floor above the extended kitchen/ Garden room. The clients love the new space and the light now floods through the house.

Client: Private
Location: Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Budget: £75,000
Engineer: Andrew Firebrace Partnership
Contractor: G J Bream Construction
Status: Completed 2006