It’s very nearly two years since we moved into The Gables, a modest little house, built in the early 1920s by a local builder. It stands on ground that once belonged to the smithy and The Hit Or Miss pub further up the street. (Both now family homes).
The move from Much Wenlock had been protracted: selling our cottage had taken time. Then there was six months in a rented house while we found somewhere to buy. It gave us chance to do some serious de-cluttering, but all the same we knew we would not fit comfortably into our new house without building a new kitchen. And so we bought it with that notion in mind.
We began, then, with something of the gamble. The Gables is in the Bishop’s Castle conservation area. Planning approval would be required, and our encounters with planning authorities in the past had not always gone well. We engaged local architectural designer, Henry Beddoes, to take care of the plans and the application. After all, it was scarcely an ambitious project replacing an old heat-leaking, plastic conservatory with a properly insulated room.
Even so, waiting for approval was still nerve-wracking. It took several months.
When it came to the actual plans, the site itself was anyway problematical. The south end of the conservatory was right on the boundary with a roadside verge, and most of the rest was nestled into the overgrown bank and hedge. There was not much room to manoeuvre, either outwards or upwards.
Flat roofs are never ideal, but a sloping roof that did not obscure the upstairs windows and had a good enough incline would have markedly reduced the height of the living space. (See previous post for internal restructuring.) And so instead we have a lantern skylight and some leaded nifty brickwork round the parapet. It seemed to us a reasonable compromise, not overburdening the existing house either in scale or fanciness. Builder Alan also cleaned and re-used all the conservatory bricks, and took pains to source new ones that were as near as possible to the 1920s fabric.
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And so there you have it: the Farrell domain…plain and unassuming, but ever so well built and insulated.
