BEAUTIFUL ON THE OUTSIDE
Does your landscape work beautifully, too?
We’ve been trusted with some big and stately renovation projects lately, lucky us! With big houses, comes big plots of land and sometimes several entry points. While this is a lovely problem to have, they don’t often function as well as they could, causing problems such as:
Guests confused where to park
Using the back door far more than the front
Wasted hallways
Gardens which are inaccessible from the house
Not maximising hours of sunlight
WELCOME!
No one wants to make a great first impression as much as a newly renovated homeowner, welcoming guests. The key is to make it very clear where they need to go. Some large houses have several paths and driveways, due to centuries of front door and backdoor deliveries. Often the back door is most convenient and becomes most used by the family every day, and so looks like the best route for visitors to follow. This often means guests end up parking out the back, by the bins, getting tangled in your washing line and arriving in your messy boot room. All while you are waiting for them in your impeccably tidy front hallway.
We design homes to be sanctuaries that feel like a hug as you walk through the door. This doesn’t work if you feel lost before you’ve even arrived, so although we are Newcastle’s finest architectural interior designers, we have become rather expert at planning the immediate landscape around homes to complete the perfect flow of the lives that are lived within them. Making sure guest know where to park and highlighting the front door above any other is key in directing them as they arrive.
This recent Northumberland interior architecture and landscaping project encouraged guests to park at the front (the sacred south west - more on this later) and enter through the front door. This cut the garden up and meant that while you were relaxing in the garden with a Pimms, the Amazon driver became part of the party.
We rectified it by reworking the driveway, creating family parking by the boot room and dedicated guest parking and a clear walkway to the house.
PICK A DOOR
Due to larger estates being listed, we can’t do much to change the exterior doors and windows, but we can change the landscape around them. We work with owners to choose the best entrances to perform different functions and then redesign the landscape to direct people accordingly. This has meant rerouting a driveway to guide and enable guests to park by the grander front entrance, while the family park at the other side, out of sight.
We made sure there was still a back entrance for the family with dedicating parking spaces, to which we added functional boot and mud rooms.
So many doors, but deciding each ones purposed based on how the house will be used is the key to a home that works.
SOUTHWEST IS KEY
I may have mentioned this before, and I am obsessed with sun-mapping; considering the time of day we will use each space. If you are lucky enough to have a southwesterly area in your garden, celebrate it! A southwest facing garden is a must-have for long summer evenings. So, if there is a choice, we will always make sure this area is garden space, not driveway / bin store / shed space. This might mean using a different door as the ‘front door’ and turning the old entrance into garden access - all of this is exactly what we look at when we Spatially Plan your home and design the interior architecture.
INDOOR-OUTDOOR LIVING
Before renovation, the site had a beautiful house, and a beautiful garden, but the two weren’t functionally connected. Now we knew where the garden should be, we connected the indoor and outdoor spaces to help the flow between the spaces while working sympathetically with architecture of stately home.
We added partier terracing to the southwest which is accessed through a grand garden door (the old front door). We added a huge entertaining space with sunken seating and an outdoor kitchen. We moved the formal lounge to the south east of the house.
Please note: the designs are by Studio Dean and the images are inspiration, found online. If anyone wishes me to credit please email and we will.
OUTSIDE-IN
We understand that just because things are where they are doesn’t mean they have to be. We think about day-to-day life for you and your guests and work around that. Sometimes the outside dictates the inside. And sometimes the interior architecture doesn’t work without landscaping the outside first.
Once we had figured out the outdoor flow to the house, we could then start planning the interior architecture. Now we knew where the front entrance was, we created a stunning lobby with a cloakroom and loo and added another staircase to completely change the flow of the indoors and make all the rooms far more accessible and ensure they all got used. The lobby flows through to a library space, with sightlines right through the house. This would have been pointless if we hadn’t worked through the outside landscaping and found the front door first.
Stay outside-in out there! If you need any architectural interior design help in Northumberland, Newcastle, Edinburgh and the Lothians, you know where we are.
Until next time,
