Tour a Cozy and Quintessentially British Household in Somerset

Usually a transfer from city to nation is enthusiastic by the motivation for a bigger property, so the irony of swapping an elegant, generous four-tale town home in London for a Georgian condominium in the Somerset wilds was not lost on companions in everyday living and do the job, Chris Graves and Jolene Ellis, cofounders of interior style and design firm Clarence & Graves.

“We were being intended to be paying a few of years in [America] with the children, but then COVID strike,” Graves recollects. The girl they’d rented their property to (in anticipation of their shift) fell so in adore with it that she supplied to buy it lock, inventory, and barrel (thoroughly furnished), freeing the couple up to glance additional afield when their go Stateside was place on keep.

Somerset had very long been a “place of respite and a retreat” for the couple due to the fact they to start with met 15 years back, Graves says, so they started to search at all the things from farmhouses to detached piles in the region until, 1 working day, Graves pulled out a “wild card,” so to converse. “It was this condominium, established on this incredible estate just outdoors the increasingly sought-soon after hip town of Bruton.”

The couple were right away drawn to its assure of lateral living, best for relatives life with their little ones Huxley, 13, and Audrey, 11, and a whippet named Clarence. “I’ve normally coveted the European concept of the elevated piano nobile (initial ground),” Graves clarifies. Include to this the allure of a swimming pool and tennis courtroom, surrounded by 25 verdant acres comprehensive with gardeners on hand—“so we really don’t even have to get our palms dirty”—and they have been bought. Toss in an sudden 3rd apartment—another operator on the home resolved to sell, serendipitously—and the duplex condominium all of a sudden boasted approximately 4,500 square toes. “It was like a fairy tale,” Ellis says.

They lived in the house for 4 months just before performing everything. “It was a real privilege to shell out time in the property, even if it was a minimal like currently being in Julia Donaldson’s [children’s] e-book, A Squash and a Squeeze,” he laughs. “We lived in one room—the kitchen experienced a couch and bed—but due to the fact it was all boarded up, we had to go all-around into an more corridor to use an outside bathroom.” It gave them, even so, a “forensic” perception into just the place the light fell and how the property intrinsically felt.

Initially techniques involved “getting the format and move appropriate,” Graves says—highlighting their ambition to develop a sweeping watch from the mudroom and the kitchen correct as a result of two drawing rooms to the eating room—as properly as “reinstating its former Georgian grandeur.” Fake ceilings housing spotlights and dividing stud walls ended up taken off, the first floorboards in the drawing rooms ended up restored, and reclaimed Georgian boards had been laid in the kitchen area, though period-correct moldings and new full-peak doors, equipped by a area carpenter, ended up returned.

For the color palette, Graves and Ellis drew on their like of storytelling. “We come to inside style and design from a marginally various angle in how we see things—we adore anything at all with a tale, and building the sensation of other worlds in each individual house,” Graves says. As serial home flippers, it seemed a normal development to style and design houses for other people. “We’ve been carrying out up properties and selling them, each a single often a small distinctive, for around a 10 years,” Ellis claims. They carry a perception of curation and playfulness to all their initiatives, from a historic house on Hampstead Heath and a retreat in Upstate New York. “One consumer stated they like our pep and wit,” Ellis laughs. “There’s just the proper amount of money of angle in what we do whilst however actually safeguarding a property’s authenticity,” Graves provides.