Bluehouse
Lane
Location | Oxted, Surrey
Scale | 3,460 sq.ft.
Bed / bath | 4 / 3
Completed | 2027 (expected)
This is our own family home, an Arts and Crafts house on Bluehouse Lane that has grown by increments for decades and lost its own logic along the way. Total redevelopment sounds bigger than it is. We are not knocking anything down and starting again, we are editing what is already good, removing what got added without thought, and giving the house one clear idea from front door to garden. It is still at design stage, and we are sharing the thinking as it develops.
| THE SPACE ALREADY THERE |
An old house, blurred by its own additions.
The house had real character: a tiled roofscape, deep gables, a solid brick base, all the ingredients of a good interwar Arts and Crafts home. But years of piecemeal extension, particularly at the back, had buried that character under add-ons that never spoke to each other or to the house. The brief was not to reinvent the building. It was to clarify it, strip back the noise, and let one coherent idea run through the whole plan.
| A COMPOSED FRONT |
The public face stays familiar, just better organised.
Brick base, rendered upper storey, clay tiled roofs and expressed framing all belong to the house and the street, so they stay. What changes is the discipline behind them. A run of strong gables now sits over a legible entrance, sheltered under its own smaller gable, with the garage properly folded into the massing rather than left to sit apart. Wider glazing in the central gable lets more light in without breaking the language of framed openings and pitched roofs.
| OBJECT INTO FRAME |
Follow the side elevation and the house changes its mind.
Read from front to back, the building moves from a tall, enclosed house into a low garden pavilion, gradually rather than in one jump. The same steep clay roof that sits over the front is lowered and compressed as it travels back. Brick walls thin into piers, contained windows widen into full glazing, and the vertical emphasis of the gables gives way to one long horizontal line at the garden. Front and rear are not two designs, they are two points on the same journey.
| A SHELTERED LOGGIA |
The house does not end at a sheet of glass.
Between the interior and the lawn sits a proper threshold, not a thin glazed edge but a loggia with real depth. Brick piers, deep reveals and the canopy above hold the glazing back under cover, so the transition runs from room, to deep opening, to masonry frame, to terrace, to planting, to garden. Different bays hold window seats, sliding doors and solid brick fins, so the rear reads as a sequence of places to sit in, not one long window.
| ROOM FOR ORDINARY LIFE |
Open enough to gather, broken up enough to actually live in.
Kitchen, dining and living sit in one connected run but each keeps its own identity, helped by generous arched openings that echo the crafted character of the house without copying it. Cooking, homework and a film on the sofa can happen at once without anyone feeling in the way. The older part of the house keeps its smaller, quieter rooms for the days that call for a closed door, so the new work is where the family gathers, and the old house is where it retreats.
