Listing of the Week: a Norfolk beauty that ushers the natural world in
With longer days ahead, we’ve all got one eye on the view out the window. And whenever the rain eventually decides to stop, we know where we’d like to be: in this cleverly modernised house in the pretty Norfolk village of East Rudham, not far from Fakenham, now on the market.
The house stands as a perfect example of the magic that can happen when you marry old and new. When seen from the front, there’s little indication of the contemporary interventions that make life so comfortable within. That said, the façade of brick and flint – materials that speak directly to the Norfolk vernacular – sets a tone that has informed the sensitivity of the rest of the design.
Inside, this conversation between the house and its context continues in the material choices made in its newer parts. Engineered oak imbues a sense of natural warmth, for instance, as does timber panelling behind the stove in the main living space. In contrast, the polished concrete in here, though distinctly manmade, welcomes an altogether tricksier building material into the palette: light, which bounces off its gleaming surface and lends the room an unexpected brilliance.
Any Journal reader will know by now that a large part of good design lies in playing to the strengths of an existing building. Here, that means turning the older rooms with smaller windows into cosy spaces for quiet retreat – snugs, studies and bedrooms, painted moody shades of blue and green that suit the fulgent glow of a lamp. In that newer kitchen/living space, meanwhile, more has rightfully been made of one of the finest technological advances we builders of today can benefit from: huge swathes of glass.
Here, vast panels of the stuff have both been used overhead and set into bi-fold doors that concertina to the side when open. The result is a sense of airiness uncommon to period houses and a feeling that the garden – leafy and secluded – is an extension of the house, another room to be enjoyed, its shimmering greenness another material in the perfectly pitched palette of this pretty village house.
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