english architecture Archives

Modern Boot Room Ideas for Modern Country Life

Posted in Feb 2021

As country house experts, we have plenty of experience in designing beautiful boot rooms to meet modern families’ needs, and events over the last couple of years mean that the boot room has never been more important in family life. We look at modern boot room ideas and how to create a space that works for your household, without compromising on aesthetics.

Boot rooms have always been a convenient midway point between the wild outside and the calm interior of a home. They are the place where you can happily leave wet coats, muddy boots, dirty dogs, umbrellas and prams without worrying that they are going to ruin any beautiful furnishings. Depending on your boot room design, they can also provide extra utility space, whether you want a separate area for laundry or a dedicated place for flower arranging.

However, these rooms came into their own even more in the COVID-19 era. The global pandemic saw homes driven to two extremes: they either became much quieter than usual, with family members locked down in different parts of the world, or the opposite, with grandparents or parents seeing their offspring return to the family estate to enjoy country living during the Coronavirus restrictions.

Modern boot room ideas for modern requirements

As life has returned to normal, the modern boot room remains an important factor in how a busy household functions. Below we look at boot room design ideas and how to create a space that works for your household.

Where to start

When looking to create the perfect country house boot room, you first need to look at your family’s day-to-day life and consider exactly how the space will be used. For example, how many children or animals do you have? How many coats, hats and pairs of shoes will need to be stored here? What are your family’s favourite activities – perhaps shooting, fishing or riding are regular hobbies? If so, what kind of kit needs to be stored? If guns will be kept there, what are the security requirements?

Once all this has been thought about, you can start to sketch out a vision of what your ideal boot room design would look like, setting out a clear idea of what needs to be done.

What to consider for optimal boot room design

As much as you may want your boot room to be aesthetically pleasing, its primary function is as a midpoint between the outside and the in. This means that mud – and how it can be easily dealt with – should be a priority. You will definitely want a hard-wearing floor, such as stone, tile, or vinyl. You should also think about drainage – for example, you may find it convenient to install a drain in the centre of the floor, meaning that mud and dirt can be easily swept away. To avoid as much as possible mud being trampled in, you could consider installing an outdoor tap, which provides an easy way for people to wash off muddy boots or animals before entering.

Another modern boot room idea for English country homes is to anticipate and work with the English weather. In many homes, boot rooms act as the main back entrance to the house, but this can mean that they let in a significant draft as people come through. So, you may wish to consider adding an extra door between the boot room and the outside world, preventing the cold and wind from coming in.

If you wish to incorporate a sink into your boot room, think carefully about what you will use it for first. For example, if you will be washing off muddy boots inside, you will want to choose a large and robust sink, whereas if you are mainly planning on using this sink for flower arranging, the sink won’t need to be as robust however the height of the tap will need to be planned to ensure that tall vases can fit underneath.

During the pandemic, the boot room was often used as a ‘decontamination zone’ to avoid bringing in germs from the outside world. It might have a washing machine and storage for detergent, allowing you to put potentially infected clothes straight in the wash as you arrive home. You can then decide whether you want your boot room to become your main laundry space, in which case you will also need to consider hanging areas for washed clothes and baskets for dirty items.

How much work is it to design and create a fully-kitted-out boot room?

As specialists in fitting English period homes to suit modern family life, we are able to handle projects with ease, whether its restoring a very old building to better suit the needs of our client or whether its a new back of house addition to an old house ensuring they understand exactly what you want from your boot room before they commence with the build.

All this may seem like a lot of effort for a simple boot room. However, when you consider what an important role this space actually plays in family life, it is well worth investing time in boot room design ideas in order to create a space that will suit all your household for years to come.

If you’d like to discuss our approach to design and our craft, please email newprojects@artichoke.co.uk or call +44 (0)1934 745270.

Carrara & the English Country Kitchen

Posted in Jun 2018

The interior design of many of our most treasured country houses in many ways reflects the characteristics of the English themselves. Restrained, understated, subtle and, occasionally, elegant.

These are all traits the Artichoke design team tries to inject into the kitchens and furniture we design for our client’s country houses. Many of these attributes are successfully delivered through the physical form of the furniture we design, such as the period mouldings we create for each piece, the width of the door frames we design and the proportion of the furniture. Achieving elegance through form can quickly be tarnished if the materials then chosen to adorn it are not well considered.

Carrara marble for country house — Carrara marble grain. Understated and elegant.

At Artichoke we believe that when a designer creates beautifully detailed kitchen furniture, little else needs to be added. This is particularly so with classical furniture where mouldings and shadow inject a wonderful flow and ripple into the face of the work. Contemporary kitchens are so often adorned with striking and flamboyant marbles because the furniture itself has little creative substance to it. By introducing a carrara marble worktop or another bold patterned marble, the designer is simply deflecting attention away from the fact the furniture is principally flat and lifeless.

It is inevitable that as designers and makers of kitchens and domestic areas of country houses, we have a view on which marble worktops look most appropriate in traditional environments. Despite our work being principally in English country houses, we tend to favour marble worktops over English stone when suggesting a design for many of our English country kitchens While many of them are extremely hard wearing (such as slates available from Lancashire), few of them can be used for pieces such as a cook’s table or a kitchen island. This is mainly due to the nature of their extraction from the rock bed. Most English stones are blasted from the quarry face with explosives, resulting in eccentric sized blocks usually no wider than two metres. By contrast, marble slabs are cut from the quarry face in huge rectangular blocks, allowing for a much greater size of slab (typically up to three metres in length). This makes marble much more practical to use in kitchen design. We explore which stones perform best for kitchen worktops in another blog ‘Ideas for Kitchen Worktops’.

Carrara marble islands — Honed Carrara Marble worktops and backsplash form an understated background to this Artichoke kitchen.

In the Georgian and Edwardian periods of English architecture, Carrara marble was the favoured stone of choice.. It can be seen in many of England’s finest country houses such as Chatsworth. Marble Arch is built from Carrara. Not only was it readily available, but it’s quiet and understated graining also reflected the characteristics of the English themselves.

Carrara marble worktops are luxurious without being opulent and they have a more understated veining compared to other more ‘vulgar’ marbles. It has been described as the elegant workhorse of the kitchen, and it ages beautifully. From a longevity point of view, Carrara marble worktops are also timeless. This works well with our designs which we create to sit comfortably and elegantly into their architectural surroundings for many years. If we are to create furniture today that will be admired by future generations (in much the same way that today we admire work created in houses like Chatsworth), then it is worth remembering Carrara for your project.

With each project, whether a kitchen or a whole house, we aim to create Britain’s future heritage, adding architectural value to our clients’ houses for their families and for future generations. We aren’t simply making joinery. We are making history.

To discuss your project, email the Artichoke team at newprojects@artichoke.co.uk or call on +44 (0)1934 745270.

A Welcome Return to Classicism

Posted in Jun 2017

Every 15 years or so I become fashionable. My worn jeans and faded blue shirt ensemble becomes the look for that season, and for a brief moment, I’m on trend. The downside is that I live in Somerset, so when everyone’s realised what the trend is here, everyone in London’s wearing something else.

As a company, Artichoke also avoids trends. Our kitchen and architectural joinery designs are naturally classical. As designers of bespoke kitchens, libraries and principle rooms, we like the elegance which classical order, balance, proportion and harmony produces, and as fine cabinet-makers it suits us too. Classical design is steeped in tradition, and we enjoy making furniture in the traditional way, using hardwood which is joined together with mortice and tenons, mason’s mitres and halving joints. It’s a tried and tested formula.

In the early 2000’s we began to notice a significant shift in furniture and room style, particularly among the super-prime homeowner in London. These buyers typically came from overseas, and arrival on the streets of London gave these wealthy incomers a new found freedom to become more gregarious, and fashionable interior design became a popular route for those wanting to make an aesthetic mark on their newly acquired English home.

The consequences were sometimes questionable. Suddenly homeowners began to request furniture made from metal effect spray coated panelling and, albeit in extreme cases, Swarovski crystal covered shoe shaped baths. Interior design became a heady mixture of luxury hotel interiors crossed with theatre. Design became depressingly temporary.

More recently however we’ve noticed a welcome reversal, with more discerning clients beginning to appreciate that elegant design is actually best achieved through gentility and restraint. An introduction to the English countryside, its pursuits and architecture has also managed to educate some buyers to the more muted ways of successful English classical furniture and interior design.

Wealthy overseas buyers are now beginning to understand that quality English interior design and architecture is about style, grace, understated beauty, and above all, permanence. They are beginning to realise that it does not pay to be on-trend with interiors. Libraries, kitchens and dressing rooms cannot be replaced every time a new fashion emerges.

At the heart of this is craft, and we explore whether we are in the middle of a new Arts and Crafts period in another blog.

Our clients homes are too important to be treated simply as temporary or artificial stage sets with shelf lives, and the furniture design work we undertake here at Artichoke needs to have this air of permanence before it can be presented to the client. For joinery and fitted furniture to truly deliver an air of permanence, it needs to look comfortable and natural in its surroundings.

Restrained elegance is a subtle way of saying so much more

There are many ways of introducing permanence into design, but one sure fire method is to deploy classically inspired design treatments, mouldings, shapes, balance and proportion. When executed well it delivers breathtaking glamour that, we think, outstrips anything that a bronze and crystal adorned flat door panel will ever deliver in its short lifetime.

What wealthy buyers have begun to understand it appears, is that less is more. Or to quote the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”

To discuss your project with us, please email newprojects@artichoke.co.uk or call +44 (0)1934 745270

The Birth of Formal English Architecture

Posted in Dec 2015

As a craft based design business focussed on creating bespoke kitchens and furniture to integrate successfully into the fabric of buildings, we need a thorough understanding of them, their histories and English architecture in general. We spend a great deal of time in buildings of all types, surveying them, designing their interiors and fixing into their structures.

We mainly work in period properties, so a firm grasp of their architecture, why they are shaped the way they are, and what materials have been chosen in their construction is very important to us. In a geeky sort of way we also find it fun.

Screen shot 2013-12-22 at 08_45_21 — Dinder House, where we created the bespoke kitchen

The First Architects

During the early 1700s and before, the building trade was actually run primarily by craftsmen; mainly by joiners and carpenters. This makes a great deal of sense; most English architecture of the time was timber framed. These craftsmen all had at least seven years of apprenticeships under their belts and were people of considerable skill.

During this period, the term ‘architect’ was used by anyone who could get away with it. Prior to the introduction of formal Italian inspired classical architecture by Inigo Jones in the mid 1600s, English architecture was essentially medieval in form, with most houses being built organically and of timber frames with no formal design organisation, proportion or layout to them. There was no real need for architects. Most new buildings were designed by builders. There was no such thing as English Architecture in a formal sense.

The introduction of formality in building design came through classical architecture. Classical English architecture’s more rigid design requirements meant the need for someone to plan and design buildings more carefully. It also required new materials to achieve the various shapes, mouldings, carvings etc and this meant a greater understanding of the materials capabilities, stresses and loads.

Banqueting House was the first building to be completed in the new neo-classical style.

To begin with, this new role of architectural designer was taken on by the joiner or craftsmen (occasionally it was also taken on by members of the landed gentry, plump with inspiration from their grand tours of Europe).

As you can see from the architecture of Banqueting House, Classical and Georgian architecture is complex; its shapes, mouldings, facades, hierarchies, planes and orders require the use of knowledge, academic formulas and new geometry that wasn’t necessary in the construction of timber framed houses. Its introduction to English architecture presented an opportunity for craftsmen to better themselves, and many stepped up to the plate.

Two things typically happen when a new and game-changing approach is introduced to any society. Firstly, an influx of quasi-specialists on the new subject appear, and in this case these were the people closest to the coal face; craftsmen and builders. Secondly, a publishing boom supports the resulting thirst for knowledge (the same thing happened during the introduction of the internet in the mid 1990’s).

Both these things happened during the introduction of classical English architecture, particularly in the publishing of building pattern books to help educate the uninitiated about classical architecture’s forms and functions. Initially, these books were written by craftsmen for fellow craftsmen, and later they were written by new architects for potential clients. These books were used by builders to copy from, and they formed the pattern around which London’s early classical architectural structure and then Georgian architecture was born. Such books also started formalising the way in which new building designs were actually erected. The most famous reference book at the time, The Art of Drawing and Working the Ornamental Parts of Architecture, was written by Batty Langley. Click this link to see some of our favourite plates from the book.

Main Georgian Architectural Materials

A formality of design also led to formality in the choice of materials.

Brick – The primary building material for Georgian buildings in London was brick made from the clay beds of London. The exterior bricks were the best quality, with garden walls, party walls etc often being constructed from ‘place’ bricks which were as much ash as they were clay and often prone to defects. Knowing the quality of what we’re fixing into is important for Artichoke; we often design quite technically complex architectural pieces such as minstrel’s galleries or large bespoke kitchens with heavy materials, and we need to know well in advance how robust the structure we’re fixing into actually is. There are a number of times I can think of when one of our installation team has attempted to drill into bricks that have simply disintegrated.

Bedford Square was one of London’s first Georgian Squares (it was built for the Duke of Bedford) and used London stock bricks.

‘Place’ bricks were the cheapest, with the most expensive being ‘Cutting’ bricks, a brick made from fine clay and capable of being very accurately cut. These bricks were usually reserved for exterior decorative architectural detail such as door or window arches.

Timber – The main timber types used by builders of the time were English oak and Baltic fir (Russian Deal is another name for it). English oak was considered a premium timber, as it still is today, and Baltic fir was used for most structural things. It was also used for interior architecture and was regularly painted and gilded. Before Georgian times, Baltic fir was scraped and left unfinished, only being painted once this became popular and Georgian tastes started to influence the English architectural scene. Finishers at Artichoke need to be able to match 300 year old Baltic fir; we have had to do exactly this for a recent project in Upper Brook Street in London.

Oak was reserved for the best and most visible structural work such as window frames and some interior architectural detailing. Mahogany brought back from the West Indies was often used for panelling, hand-rails, panelled doors and so on in high-end residences.

Stone – Stone was used less in Georgian buildings than one may think, certainly for many of the more domestic London townhouses. Portland stone was used decoratively in London homes for items such as window dressings, exterior cornices and porches.

For Artichoke, an extensive knowledge of these materials, and the scale and proportions required to be true to classical English architecture is vital, not just because it helps us understand the context we’re fitting our work into, but also because it informs our design decisions. In this way our work becomes part of the evolution of the house continuing the legacy of classical English architecture.

Tag: english architecture