When we design homes we are always striving for beauty and elegance whilst maximising value area. Including accommodation floorspace within the roof structure can provide useful additional area, but can make the roof look quite bulky. To avoid the roof looking bulky, we often introduce dormers, rooflights and sprocketed eaves.

Introducing a sprocketed eaves can help to disguise the mass of the roof and provide a deep eaves to cast a pleasing shadow on the façade of the building. This award winning home in Wiltshire includes three storeys of accommodation but the gentle change of roof pitch (the sprocket) as it runs up helps visually lighten the mass this extra floor would normally create.

Seeing the potential in sites can sometimes be difficult, an underwhelming house in the wrong place on the plot can cloud someone’s judgement. We relish the challenge of looking beyond the existing to create a dream property whilst is perfect for the site.

A good example of that is this project in Berkshire we designed which replaced an understated bungalow with a Classical country house. The resulting house is much more suited to the parkland like gardens and sylvan setting of the property.

We think Georgian architecture is gorgeous, so we were very pleased when Jason Orme applied the same term to our work in the title of his article about one of our country house projects in Wiltshire. The article, in the April 2015 issue of Homebuilding and Renovating Magazine, illustrates this beautiful family home across 9 pages with pictures by Simon Maxwell.

The beginning of the article sums up our approach to this style of home perfectly... "Creating a well-executed new home in traditional style requires the services of a skilled designer and a willingness to stress about the details".

It is not unusual that a client will approach us with a site which already has a building on it, sometimes we can work with the existing buildings, sometimes there are too many issues with the existing building to make this feasible and sometimes it is just in the wrong place. By examining all the options we can deliver a design which fully exploits the opportunities a site presents to provide the optimal solution.

These before and after photos show an example of this where a distinctly poor example of a 1960s/70s house was replaced by this Georgian inspired design in the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The more historic wing at the front was retained and carefully repaired to act as an annexe.