WHEN MARINA AND TIM CALLAND RENOVATED THEIR PERIOD FAMILY HOME, THEY DID SO WITH A SUCCESSFUL BLEND OF OLD AND NEW
FEATURE CARRIE MITCHELL
| BEFORE & AFTER HOME | BEST HOME 2023
HOME NOTES
Marina Calland, an events organiser, lives here with her husband Tim, a barrister, and their two children, Lyova, 15, and Sasha, 12, plus Marina’s mum, Tetiana.
A five-bedroom Edwardian terraced house in southwest London.
Kitchen-diner
‘By knocking down the old conservatory and extending, we created this open-plan family space. We wanted the new parts of the house to have a contemporary feel.’
BUY THE KEY PIECES
Custom-built kitchen, price on request, Bespoke Made. Try Kalla pendant, £73.50; Ulrik stool, £155, both Holloways of Ludlow
Marina and Tim had lived in their home for 11 years before they started renovating in 2021. They had always planned to make changes but when they first moved in, they had a two-year-old plus a baby on the way, so the timing wasn’t right.
‘We had been looking for a house which would work for us for a while,’ explains Marina. ‘This one had the basics, but we wanted to wait for the kids to grow a little before starting.’
But when they got around to sorting their finances and engaging an architect, lockdown happened and the building work had to be put on hold.
FINDING A VISION
The couple’s plan was to create a larger kitchen-diner by incorporating the space taken up by the old conservatory. They also wanted to have an extra bedroom plus a new family bathroom, and to redo the leaky loft conversion to create an impressive main bedroom suite.
‘In all honesty, Tim and I are not very good at visualising what we want in a home,’ says Marina. ‘But we do know what we don’t like. We were lucky to find architect Dan Gibbons of APE Architecture & Design (ape-ad.co.uk) who went above and beyond for us.’
Dan started by asking the couple questions which forced them to think more clearly about how their home should look and feel. ‘If you’d asked me years ago how I imagined our style, I think it would have been quite traditional,’ says Marina. ‘But we were surprised to be so drawn to modern designs. In particular, we wanted something a little different for our conservatory, with contemporary windows and skylights.’
MAKING MOVES
Marina continues, ‘It felt like the work took forever! We started in October 2021 and assumed we’d be finished in a year, so arranged to rent a house for 12 months. But then, the war in Ukraine broke out. I’m Ukrainian and my mum still lived there, so we travelled to the Polish border to get her out.
It was the most stressful week of my life. When the five of
