A bit like a modern art gallery

A bit like a modern art gallery

A young family breathes new life into an English manor house. The focal point is a bright and colourful hi tech kitchen, which draws attention to the early Georgian architecture, at the same time bringing it into the here and now.

It was love at first sight. But it took seven long years until the initial infatuation became a serious relationship. It took that long for the sale to go through and for the English manor to finally change hands. The new owners: a young married couple, who seven years earlier had fallen in love with the feudal building dating from the 15th century. And the funny thing is that both of them have very modern tastes! For that very reason, the vision of the brand new owners was to keep as much as possible of the existing architecture but to make clear adjustments geared towards modern living requirements. Within the historic walls, they wanted to make a home for themselves and their four young children.
To design the kitchen, the heart of their new home, they hired the services of Martin Holliday. They already knew each other: as the Design Director of Chiselwood, the interior design and kitchen studio that he runs together with his wife Mel in the English city of Lincoln, he had already designed a dressing room and the kitchen for the previous owners of the family’s former home. Due to his experience working with period and listed buildings, the designer and skilled furniture maker seemed to be just the man for the project. His ability to design a whole room and not just the kitchen furniture spoke for him. “As we knew the customers well, we felt confident that they would go along with our suggestion,” Martin Holliday tells us and proved to be right: the house owners practically gave him free rein as far as the design was concerned.

A symbiosis of the old and the new
The requirements were clear: on the one hand, the customers wanted to keep the predominantly 18th-century details like the moulding on the ceiling, the wainscoting, the marble fireplace and the original window shutters and doors. On the other hand, they wanted a practical room that would be suitable for both informal family meals and social evenings with guests. Holliday’s solution: “All of the furniture is free-standing and is only fixed in place with a few screws. I didn’t think it was right to interfere with a room that was created so long ago. I didn’t want to damage anything.”

Chiselwood