How to transform a drab 1980s house into a minimalist masterpiece
First came the 1980s revival in music and fashion. Now one architect could be spearheading a revival of 1980s houses — a dubious period of architecture. “For me, the 1980s are when developers really started thinking about how to save money, and aesthetics started to take a back seat,” says the architect Andy Ramus, founder of AR Design Studio in Winchester.
So it was a tall order when a couple in Leicestershire, Paul and Jade, bought a rather ordinary 1980s house and asked him to transform it into a modern, minimalist home for them and their son. They had previously lived in a 17th-century cottage and bought this house specifically for its uninterrupted view of rolling hills. The architecture, not so much. “The house was unpleasant to look at,” Ramus recalls. “It was quite busy, with a wrinkly pantile roof and lots of different materials that didn’t hang together well.”
The front: before and after
The interior was similarly dated, with an avocado bathroom, mustard carpets and an unusual layout: it had one bedroom on the ground floor and a small first floor with only two bedrooms. “But I could see how we could take a few walls out and make it work, and it would be cheaper than a new build,” Ramus says.
He took a model of the existing house and, using the architectural software SketchUp, started to delete bits he didn’t like. Out went the pitched roof, replaced by a modernist-style box above the bungalow bit of the old house. Flat roofs are not the leaky liabilities they were back in the 1960s, Ramus says. “Flat roofs should always have a slope in it, about two degrees, which you can’t really see. That lets the water run where it needs to go. And we’re not using asphalt on flat roofs any more. We use single-ply membranes, which are extremely reliable.”
The back: before and after
The owners had considered rendering over the cheap 1980s brick, but Ramus found a Siberian larch cladding that complemented it and gave the house a hint of Scandi cool. Now the couple love the original brick.
The old house had several smallish rooms on the ground floor, so Ramus knocked them through to create one 1,000 sq ft open-plan kitchen/dining room/living room with double-height ceilings and a 7m-wide span of glazing overlooking the fields. There’s a 5m-wide sliding door and a 1,400mm roof overhang to help to keep the room cool in the summer.
The view from a bedroom
MARTIN GARDNER
The open-plan room has one partial wall, which Ramus kept for structural reasons but also to make the living-room area feel more intimate. Overall they’ve increased the floorplan by 50 per cent: the first floor now has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, and the ground floor also has a TV room, play room, utility room, pantry and a WC.
But the biggest transformation is in feel: the boring executive home is now the stuff of architectural coffee table books. The showpiece is the internal bridge that connects the old first-floor bedrooms to the two new bedrooms. Flanked by a glass balustrade, the bridge hovers above the living room, and offers a framed view through a timber-lined tunnel. Ramus calls this feature an oculus — an architectural eye of sorts.
The internal bridge
MARTIN GARDNER
“Downstairs you’ve got the 180-degree panoramic vista and you get it all in one go. From the bridge you’re getting a framed, shaped view. It draws the eye into the landscape. We’re inviting you to stop and look out from the bridge at that view in a new way,” Ramus says. “We’re trying to create a house that’s interesting. Not just walking from one room to the other. Adding interest and delight and stimulation.”
Another talking point is the use of timber cladding inside — on the walls and the ceilings, instead of plaster. “I’ve tried to talk clients into it in the past and failed,” Ramus says. “People have this phobia of feeling that they’re living in a sauna. But Paul and Jade have embraced it. I think it makes for interesting and warm spaces. We all live in white boxes these days — mundane and not inspiring. With natural timber walls and ceilings there’s some sort of spirituality thing going on where we feel homely and warm and secure in a way that we don’t in a white box. It’s a slightly primitive thing.”
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The internal timber (it’s also Siberian larch) prevents the rest of the house from feeling too stark; the clients are devoted minimalists. Instead of cornices and skirting boards there are 3mm shadow gaps, while underfloor heating negates the need for clunky radiators, and outside, the gutters and downpipes are concealed.
Floor-to-ceiling cupboards without handles, which look like walls, cover entire rooms, hiding clutter and keeping furniture to a minimum; the bedrooms have 41 feet of linear storage; the utility room and pantry 26 linear feet; the kitchen 46 feet of oak veneer cupboards made by Kitchen Architecture. “It just improves your life, not having stuff everywhere,” says Ramus, who recommends push-to-open catches by Hafele for cupboards without handles. “They cost a bit more, but they’re worth it. You can buy push-to-open catches in Ikea but they don’t work as well and the doors keep pinging open.”
The kitchen
MARTIN GARDNER
The kitchen’s polished concrete floors were a risky move. “I have a love-hate relationship with polished concrete floors,” Ramus says. “They look great. The problem is that you can’t show a client what it is going to look like. If you lay it on a hot day it will come out one colour, on a cold day another colour. It also depends on the supplier. I’ve had clients who say, ‘I don’t like it, I wasn’t expecting it to be so dark.’ So now when I do concrete floors I use a company called Lazenby as they do have good quality control. But if you are getting your ground worker to do it, you are rolling the dice pretty hard.”
Paul and Jade were more cautious when it came to buying furniture. Their old stuff wouldn’t have worked here, but they didn’t want to rush into it and buy stuff they later regretted. So they rented furniture for the first six months from the company Camerich so they could try out different styles. They ended up buying 20 per cent of it.
Paul and Jade preferred not to discuss the budget for the renovation but say the original house cost about £600,000 to buy in 2020. Ramus says budgets for each project are different, but he advises clients to allow £185 per square foot for a high-quality refurbishment and £325 per square foot for an extension.
The living space
CHRIS RADBURN FOR THE TIMES
The couple installed new plumbing, windows, wiring and underfloor heating. To reduce energy bills, Ramus recommended they install 250mm-thick Kingspan foam insulation boards in the roof and behind the cladding — more than the 200mm minimum required.
The couple took a year to plan it with Ramus, who says planning permission was a breeze — planners look favourably on making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and using natural materials in a rural landscape.
The architect designed the staircase to look like a ladder
MARTIN GARDNER
The build took two years, a year longer than they expected. All the fine details — the shadow gaps, the larch cladding — took time. When things got complicated somebody asked them why they hadn’t knocked the whole thing down and started from scratch, but the couple are pleased they made do with what they had.
“I’m happy that this is an amalgamation of what was here before. It was a good structure, it was well built and the brickwork is still the same, so it’s got a connection to the past,” Paul says.
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Jade says. “I’m glad we didn’t demolish everything, and took a house and made it better.”
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