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www.thedesignermagazine.com
Modern Times
Shortlisted for the Design Awards 2010, this modern bathroom in an imposing manor house called for a sensitive creative approach
CREATING
a modern interior in
a period home without riding roughshod over the existing character features takes a high degree of skill. It would be far easier sometimes just to treat the room in isolation, delivering all the requirements of modern living and blocking out the signs of historical context that the architecture inevitably wants to display. If interior design was that easy however, it would be a far less creative – and much more dull – profession to work in. It certainly wouldn’t appeal so much to Tim Baber, a previous winner of the Design Awards in 2008 when working with Ripples, and now running his own successful Bristol- based practice Yellow Duck Interiors. “The first time I pulled up to the house
was a very daunting experience,” says Baber, of arriving at this large pile near Bristol. The
house is Regency with a large Victorian extension. “What seemed at first to be just a large room actually had many obstacles to consider, what with the large sash window in the centre and two large doors – one leading onto the main hall landing and one to the master bedroom.” The ceiling was nearly three metres high in one section, and yet was low and arched in the other. There were also two alcoves each side of the window. Oh, and being an old building, the floors and walls were far from uniform as you might expect.
Baber’s first decision was that the bath had to take centre stage. This meant moving the original basins – one in each of the recesses either side of the window. The bath is a Castello, teamed with brassware from the Axor Massaud Collection. “I placed them on a raised level, which meant that part of the floor was going to end on a level surface but also reinforced the floor to take the weight. The rest of the floor wasn’t to be as easy as the door manifolds couldn’t be changed into either landing or bedroom, so they had to stay off level.”
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“I WANTED TO CREATE A LUXURIOUS SPACE, BUT NOT OVER THE TOP”
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