Holly
Cottage
A timber-clad kitchen extension in Mayford Village, Woking, Surrey, that maximises the connection between house and garden.
Location | Mayford Village, Surrey
Scale | 1,630 sq.ft.
Bed / bath | 3 / 2
Completed | 2025
Photography | French + Tye
Holly Cottage sat in a beautiful Green Belt plot and barely acknowledged it. A garage and a small office had grown across the back of the house, so the garden was something you walked past rather than lived in. We took the rear of the house apart and put it back together around a single idea, that the garden should be the first thing you see and the last thing you forget. The house is now unmistakably of its place.
| THE BRIEF |
Make the house and the garden read as one.
Our client was not looking to move, and she was not chasing square footage. She had a good village and an unusually large and beautiful plot, which was being landscaped as we worked. What she wanted was a house that made proper use of it. Three things sat behind the brief. Connect the house to the garden, improve the flow and use of space, and bring in far more natural light.
| AS WE FOUND IT |
The best part of the plot had been given to a utility room.
A converted garage and a small office had accumulated across the rear of the cottage over the years, forming a wall between the house and the garden. Every room that mattered faced away from the view. The hallway was dark, the kitchen was landlocked, and the only glimpse of planting came from a window nobody stood at. Nothing about the house was bad. It was simply pointed the wrong way.
| NEW, BUT WARM |
Timber, not a glass box.
The extension had to read as new. It did not have to read as cold. We clad it in fresh timber, chosen so that it sits against the white render of the old cottage as a clear, confident contrast, and so that it weathers rather than dates. The result is modern without being clinical, crafted rather than engineered. Old and new are in conversation here, not competition.
| ROOMS WITHOUT WALLS |
Open plan does not have to mean one big room.
The plan of the extension folds, and those folds create pockets. Cooking, eating and sitting each have a place of their own without a single door between them. The clearest example is the fixed picture window, where the reveal is deepened and a bench built into it, so a window becomes a room, somewhere to sit with a coffee and look out at the planting. Definition, without division.
| THE FIRST VIEW |
You should be able to see the garden from the front door.
This became the organising rule of the whole project, and everything downstream had to obey it. Stand at the entrance now and the eye runs the full depth of the house, through the hall, past the kitchen, out through the glazing and into the planting beyond. It is a view that costs nothing to enjoy and changes the feeling of arriving home. Every plan we drew was tested against it.
| A ROOM THAT CAN CLOSE |
A study inside the house, not exiled from it.
The office stays part of the family, until it needs not to be. A sliding door lets it join the open plan or withdraw from it in a second. Bespoke joinery makes a modest footprint work hard, with everything stored and nothing on show. A generous side window brings greenery to the desk without spending the garden frontage, which belongs to the family, not to work.
| THE STAIRCASE MOVED |
One decision, three answers.
Relocating the stairs was the most disruptive move we made and the one we would make again. It cleared the sightline from the front door to the garden. It gave us room to bring daylight down from above, so a dark hallway is now the brightest part of the entrance. And, almost as a bonus, it turned a piece of circulation into the sculptural heart of the house.
