Renovating a 16th Century House

When they first saw the run-down house in its wood­ed setting with its varied roof­line, tile hung front and richly-textured Sussex clay tile roof, Steve and Liz Pearce immediately saw its potential. From the rear of the house, which is in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, there are uninter­rupted views over the wide valley of the Sussex Ouse, which flows down to Lewes seven miles away. The house, in its four acre plot, had been on the market a long time and the word locally was that it was so rambling and inconvenient that it had frightened off other would-be purchasers.

This did not deter the Pearces. They realised they could live in it with their two small daughters but they would need to think hard and find a lot of money if they were turn it into an ideal family home. They saw its long length – it would almost certainly have originally been a row of three farm cottages – as an advantage because they could lock themselves away in one end while the work took place in the other.

“In the long term we realised that we should have to come up with a scheme to improve the layout because down­stairs, over various periods, a single storey extension had been built all along the rear and we had to go through the kitchen and dining room and into the rear to get to the downstairs wc,” explained Steve.
“Upstairs the main problem was that the girls had to share one large bedroom. Clearly this would not be suit­able as they grew older, so we resolved to divide this into two as soon as we were able.”

The Pearces decided to do what was immediately need­ed to make the house comfortable in their first 12 months, then take a break before undertaking the more radical remodelling they knew would be required to make the house their ideal home.
For the first phase they acted as main contractors, employ­ing Liz’s builder father Terry Denyer, to help them with the more tricky bits. “Steve is quite practical but as I knew from our previous houses he is very good at demoli­tion — but not quite so skilled at putting things together again!” says Liz.

They tore out the old partitions that had separated the original kitchen from the front of the house to create a hallway, ending up with one large kitchen that stretched right across the long narrow building. In the course of this they found some historic timber framing that revealed that this end of the house – the other end was much altered in the 19th century – was originally oak-framed. The age of this part of the property has now been estimated at 16th century.

“We really had no clue that the house was as old as this so we were quite thrilled when we found the beams,” says Steve. “It made the extremely messy business of sand­blasting worthwhile and at least we were able to live at the east end, which we hardly touched apart from having it painted inside and out.”

They were also busy upstairs, where Terry helped them to divide a large bedroom in the centre of the house into two rooms for their daughters, Emily, now 14, and Jo, 12. For about £30,000 they ended up with a house they felt they could live in. They then took stock and decided to add a conservatory to the west end as the main addition around which the remodelling would revolve.

Architect Cedric Ellis, a family friend for many years, started out with this in mind, but suggested a more radical scheme to alter the entire west end to create a new bedroom for Steve and Liz with far superior views over countryside to the north.
“It meant the kitchen floor had to come up again after only 18 months because Cedric wanted to reduce the floor level, but we went along with this because Steve, who is 6’ 2” tall, was always banging his head on the ceiling and we wanted to avoid yet more changes of level,” says Liz. “Besides, there were already several changes of level on the ground floor and we did not want yet another one. It was very disruptive but at least we were able to create a temporary kitchen in some of the single storey space at the rear.”

This time round they decided not to be main contrac­tors but to extend their mortgage and plough some of the profits of their increasingly successful food manufac­turing and distribution business into the project, which they left in the hands of Cedric and his partner Gavin Sargent.

“Cedric and Gavin both realised, like us, that there was not a lot we could do at the front of the house, which is bounded by woods, and that we would have to concen­trate on the west end and use windows on the north-facing rear of the house to import light and make the most of the views,” says Steve.

 “The extension more than doubled the size of the kitchen and has proved very successful. With its pitched glass roof it lets in masses of light, and the oak beams and floor make it a friendly and welcoming room that is ideal for entertaining as well as relaxing.

“Gavin’s other clever idea was to retain the garage as a storeroom, and create an entrance to it from the new glazed porch and doorway at the front. He encouraged us to demolish the end wall of the garage and rebuild it, with a chimney stack, as the common wall with the garage and the conservatory room. Inside we have built an inglenook-style fireplace with a log burner using bricks reclaimed from the original kitchen floor.”

The addition to the house has meant Liz and Steve have also been able to extend the master bedroom above and create a balcony that faces west, where they like to sit out on summer evenings. “Steve is happy because we have been able to install the spiral staircase he has always wanted as a means of climbing up there from the garden,” says Liz. “We could have gone out further at the rear – the house is unlisted – but we did not feel it necessary. Instead we built over the existing kitchen extension at the rear by adding a new gable end to create our en suite bathroom.

“The designer, Nigel Sullivan, was excellent, but we were still reminded of the advantage of using an architect to design and supervise such a major remodelling when a problem arose over the interface between the builder, Robin Cross, and the kitchen contractors who employed Nigel, Smallbone Kitchens,” says Steve. “It centred on the waste pipes – where the contracts joined up.

“In the event Gavin sorted it all out amicably but I realis­ed that with both of us extremely busy at a crucial time of the development of the business that we had made the correct decision to leave it to the experts and not act as main contractors second time round.”

With hindsight their only regret was that while all this was taking place and the house was in such a state of   disruption they did not do more upstairs. “We could have built out further on the garden side and created a joint bathroom for the girls while at the same time restoring the corridor that used to run through the top floor of the house,” says Steve. “This would have meant that once again there would have been upstairs access from one end of the house to the other, as there was when we came here. This is not the case at present and we currently use the staircase in the 19th century end of the house to get to the far end of the upstairs. It is something we should like to rectify when we get going again, as I’m sure we shall.”