A Home Re-born

Reinventing old furniture has been an education for Kim and Lewis Holmes, who have transformed an old school into an extraordinary family home

- Heather Dixon

KIM and Lewis’s first impressions of the old village school were not encouraging. All the doors and windows had been flung open to ‘warm it up inside’, one of the interior walls was covered in black mould and there was a dilapidated old toilet block in the yard.

‘It was quite grim,’ says Kim, ‘not what we were looking for at all – but by the time we had looked round we were really excited about its potential.’ The fact that it had been empty for three years and was showing signs of decay, and that it still looked like a school – with remnants of the gym equipment and sliding classroom doors – was seen as a challenge rather than a problem.

‘We were very excited by the idea of taking a very tired, empty old building and reinventing it,’ says Kim. ‘We wanted a project, something to renovate, and this certainly needed some work.’

Lewis and Kim, who was expecting their fourth child, Django at this point, moved in in April 1999 and prepared themselves to live on a building site while they took out fake beams and old units in the kitchen, removed a dividing wall and demolished the outside loo. Then they started to reconfigure the interior.

The kitchen was originally the school master’s house, the dining hall was a gym, and the sitting room and main bedroom were classrooms. When the house was later converted into a guest house and tearoom, the roof space was turned into bedrooms, but Kim and Lewis wanted to turn the old tearooms into living space and renovate the entire property using reclaimed materials.

‘We salvaged everything we could, including the roof tiles and bricks off the toilet block, and then sourced slates, beams, old bricks, stone and church fittings to include in the renovation,’ says Lewis. ‘We were both working full time and raising a family so we did the work as and when we had time.’