Heald Green residents Alison and Richard Bond approached architect Lisa Raynes several years ago via the charity Shelter’s initiative ‘Architect your Home’ when they were living in another property. Lisa gave her honest and professional advice and explained that it would cost far more than the investment was worth to create the space they wanted there. 3 years later, when they moved to Heald Green and wanted to create a single storey extension with an open plan kitchen, utility and shower room, Alison and Richard contacted Lisa again at Pride Road, this time the results were extraordinary! They began with a half day concept design workshop….
We met Lisa in January 2015, she came to our house and we did a workshop on what we wanted from our new space, what we could afford, what our expectations were so we could build a vision of what we wanted it to look like when it was finished.
And then we sat on that for nearly 2 years as we mulled it over and made sure all the decisions that we'd made were the right ones and we had a baby in that time and now I've gone back to work after maternity leave, that seemed like a good time to start a building project.
The project has been in progress for 11 weeks so far.
The space used to be a long thin kitchen that led onto a small square dining room. The kitchen was very basic, very narrow and very cramped, and the dining room was very dark. We wanted to have a big family room where we could cook and eat and chat together, where I could keep and eye on the children doing their homework and to be able to have coffee with a friend all at the same time. So we knocked down the wall that was dividing the kitchen and the dining room and then went back 3 meters, to make a big family kitchen diner. At the workshop Lisa suggested that we could partition off a section of the space to make a utility room and that would be big enough for a shower room. That wouldn't have occurred to me and that has been the best decision we have made. That area is completely separate from the kitchen dinner, so when the children are muddy and have been playing outside, they can just come in, use the loo, get clean and they don't impinge on my lovely, lovely white space.
Alison and Richard Bond
We wanted to have a big family room where we could cook and eat and chat together, where I could keep and eye on the children doing their homework and to be able to have coffee with a friend all at the same time.
