Impressed by Margot’s publish some time again on the stellar, nontraditional kitchens she noticed on the web sites of European actual property companies, I discovered myself perusing the listings of my favourite U.Okay. company, The Fashionable Home, and there, I got here throughout an particularly dreamy providing: a rambling two-acre, multi-building property bought by a pair of artists, Leila El-Kayem and Sophie Mayer, who lovingly remodeled the dilapidated Victorian walled backyard into a classy retreat that’s appealingly tough across the edges.
The 2 creatives (Leila is a conceptual artist and poet; Sophie is a painter) enlisted structure agency McClean Quinlan to assist them remodel the backyard right into a two-bedroom dwelling that faucets into the “feral” panorama of the realm. “There’s one thing about strolling into an untamed house that provides you permission to grow to be untamed your self,” Sophie informed The Fashionable Home’s Journal. “It lowered us again to an instinctive way of life, and that turned very humbling and formative for each of us.”
“We needed to retain as a lot as attainable of what was already right here,” continued Leila. “So we labored with the present supplies to make it possible for we honoured what got here earlier than us, preserving the romanticism of the break. We haven’t knocked something down. We simply tried to maintain the integrity of what’s right here and slowly restore it.”
Right here’s a peek at their cherished, lived-in retreat. Head right here for the total interview.
Pictures by Paul Whitbread, courtesy of The Fashionable Home.














