GIVEN the complexity of building a new home, how do you make it an enjoyable experience? ‘The key ingredients are finding a professional design team and building team, and that everyone gets along well together,’ says Nigel Armstrong, chairman of residential builder R. W. Armstrong. ‘Make sure you are surrounded by people you want to spend a year or more with—you are going to be talking about personal things, in detail, on a very regular basis, so personalities are important.’
To find the team, most agree on the benefits of personal recommendation from friends, colleagues, and other professionals—and COUNTRY LIFE’s Top 100 published every spring. Search engines and services, such as RIBA Client Advisers (www.architecture.com)and RedBook (www.redbookagency.com) may also be useful. Know who will lead the project —usually the architect—and that the practice is willing and able to take on the full gamut of tasks you expect, including co-ordinating all the other professionals involved.
‘Assemble the team as early as you can,’ advises Hugh Petter, director of Adam Architecture. ‘For example, I always like getting the interior designer involved when the scheme is still at the concept stage, so they can have proper input into the design.’ Not only will this result in the most joined-up thinking, but it may also encourage optimum creativity. ‘You get the whole team’s view from the beginning and develop the vision together,’ says landscape architect Marian Boswall, principal of Marian Boswall Studio.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 05, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 05, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
