Property

I N S I D E T O DAY

S E LF BUI LD

Ab pre-fabForget bricks and mortar: the future is modular page 4

I N TE RNATI ONAL

Tee off in eastern Portugal at a new resort for golfers page 6

WATE RS I D E

Get on board with this Olympic rowing champion page 7

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Anna White reveals the winners of the Society of British and International Design awards, from a classy Cairo flat to the ultimate teenage den

The best interior design in the world

H OT S P OT S

Boo! The spookiest castles to be found

around the globe page 8

*** Saturday 28 October 2017 . telegraph.co.uk

Saturday 28 October 2017 The Daily Telegraph2 ***

COVER STORY

MIXING OLD AND MODERN

Jen Bernard’s transformation of a !ve-storey house in Glasgow, below, won the award for best house design under £1 million

BRIGHT AND BREEZY

Designer Clare Gaskin, right, was nominated for the best house design under £1 million for the Surrey fun house, cover

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sleepover at some point so in one of the rooms I added a sofa bed with pull-out drawers for the bedding – a space to crash out. I also insisted on keeping some kitchen facilities so that he could at least heat up meals and make drinks.”

Despite the different client – an ado-lescent rather than a well-to-do Glas-wegian family – the members’ lounge theme features again. “We put wooden wall panelling and timber beams back into the living room, against a palette of  grey and blue with striped wallpa-per,” she says. Other in#uences were

A Georgian lodge turned teenager’s fun house in leafy Surrey, a Fifties revamp of a Scottish townhouse, and a luxurious log cabin with 110 yards of velvet curtains to shut

out the dark Russian nights are three of the properties that could in#uence your future interior choices.

They are the world’s most critically acclaimed residential design projects this year, celebrated last night at the eighth annual Society of British and In-ternational Design (SBID) awards. En-trants from 40 countries attended as accolades were doled out for the best house design and best apartment de-sign under £1 million, best residential project over £1 million and best show home, as well as the best designed of-fice, public space, hotel, bar and res-taurant, among others. The entries were varied, to say the least.

Think Mad Men meets Miami to pic-ture Jen Bernard’s transformation of a five-storey, sandstone townhouse in the heart of Glasgow’s West End, which scooped the award for the best residen-tial house design under £1 million.

The Grade A listed building with views over Kelvingrove Park had been derelict for more than five years, falling into disrepair after being used as office space in the Nineties. Bernard’s brief was to create a contemporary yet his-torically sympathetic look and restore the period features throughout the building. An architect-cum-designer, she was even involved at the planning stage to prove that the overhaul would celebrate rather than eradicate the building’s Georgian heritage.

“The client wanted a stylish and in-viting family home with a luxurious finish and an abundance of wow-factor detail,” says Bernard, 37. Instead of blindly following the brief, Bernard studied the owner’s lifestyle, job and even clothes to build a vision. “We didn’t impose one style, we pulled dif-ferent schemes together with luxury as our starting point.” The client has a soft

spot for Miami so after Bernard’s team restored the original period features – cornicing, coving and panelled walls – they focused on delivering a mid-century socialite theme using prints from Slim Aarons, the celebrity photographer, and mirrored walls in the lift. They even sourced an original Fifties lift dial.

Bernard used a neutral but rich pal-ette, adding texture using silks and vel-vet and introducing colour via the furniture, such as the navy chaise longue with gold trim. “My favourite room is the members-only themed for-mal lounge,” she says. “It’s very English and tasteful with rich blues, Jonathan Adler furniture and Hermès cushions. Mimicking a gentleman’s club, it opens into a kitchen with a marble island and a #oor-to-ceiling wine rack.”

The refined elegance of Park Terrace is a world away from Clare Gaskin’s Surrey Fun House, a runner-up in the same category.

“My client’s teenage son asked for a basketball hoop in their garden. He said no – then, in secret, bought a one-storey Georgian lodge over the road,” says Gaskin, who runs her own interior design agency in Putney, south-west London. Her brief was to turn this property into the ultimate teenage den. “I was asked to include video game chill-out rooms, a gym, sauna and an outdoor basket-ball court.”

From the outside, the ele-gant building belongs to a for-gotten era with its whitewashed brick and grey slate roof. A passer-by would have no idea of the mind-bog-gling madness that lies inside. The only clue is the wrought iron knocker on the front door, in the shape of a small hand pushing a basketball through a hoop.

“It was the craziest brief I’ve ever had,” says Gaskin. One of her biggest challenges was to balance creativity with

practicalities. She commissioned graf-fiti artists to create a Space Invader-themed den (with a Pacman en suite wet room) and hired a neon artist to design a multi-coloured gaming room with a neon chandelier. She went one better on the original request for a bas-ketball hoop, creating a multi-purpose court with different lines that light up to allow a range of games to be played.

“I tried to get into the mindset of a teenage boy,” she says. “The client asked me to remove all the bedrooms but I figured his son would want a

3*** The Daily Telegraph Saturday 28 October 2017

T H E

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R O U N D U P

Selected snippets from the world of property

EDINBURGH’S PROPERTY MARKET POWERS UPWhile house price growth in London has slowed to a rate below that of inflation, in Scotland the market is hotting up.

According to Hometrack, Edinburgh has the highest rate of growth of the UK’s 20 biggest cities at 6.7 per cent, overtaking Manchester and

Birmingham. Glasgow also recorded a significant increase in growth, up from 1.8 per cent a year ago to 5.3 per cent today.

Activity climbed, too: the number of sales

north of the border increased by 20 per

cent in the past three months, compared with the same period last

year; in England it was 14 per cent. The

average growth rate in the 20 cities has slowed from 6 per cent a year ago to 4.9 per cent.

SERENA WILLIAMS SERVES UP HER LOS ANGELES HOME

…But there’s not a tennis court in sight. The grand slam champion (left) has put her Bel Air mansion up for sale for almost

$12 million (£9 million). The house, which is more than 6,000 sq

ft and sits on almost

three acres of land, has six bedrooms and a swimming pool, but no tennis court, as the new mother doesn’t bring her work home with her.

The house has luxurious details such as manicured gardens, lots of marble, and a claw-foot bathtub. Williams also owns an apartment in Paris and a house in Palm Beach, Florida.

COULD YOU AFFORD TV’S SCARIEST HOMES?

The house in Stranger Things, Netflix’s cultish science fiction series, would cost around £76,000, according to Which? Mortgage Advisers. In time for Halloween it has picked five fictional homes in some of the scariest film and TV shows

and worked out their prices if they were in the real world.

The Stranger Things house in Hawkins, Indiana, benefits from a great location and being near schools. The grand Connecticut home from the film Beetlejuice has been valued at £589,000, while the Gothic-style mansion from The Woman in Black, in the wilds of Northumbria, is £1.44 million. The house has high ceilings, intricate stained-glass windows, and impressive chandeliers, but viewings must be made before high tide before it is cut o$ from the mainland.

Boo! the Stranger Things home

Vista: Edinburgh on high

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COURTING SUCCESS

Light-up lines create a multi-purpose ball game court at the Surrey fun house, above; an airy !at in Cairo by DAR Designs, left, was nominated for the best apartment design under £1 million award

PENTHOUSE

PERFECTION Fenton Whelan won the best residential design over £1 million for its Greybrook House penthouse in Mayfair, main

‘I’ve never been a fan of feature walls. If you are going to commit to a colour, go for it’

scratch. A project like this comes along once in a ca-reer, Gaskin says, but more briefs are calling for imaginative colours. The majority of people want to stay safe and opt for a grey palette, which was a “backlash against the Kelly Hoppen taupe”. For those who are feeling bold, however, ink blues, mustards and greens are creeping in. “I’ve never been a fan of feature walls. If you’re going to commit to a colour, go for it.”

The Society of British and Interna-tional Design awards’ judging panel, which included Sir Michael Dixon, the director of the Natural History Mu-seum, also revealed the winner of the best apartment design under £1 million at last night’s ceremony. Helena Ko-rnilova, a Russian interior designer, picked up the prize for her refurbish-ment of a countryside apartment

on  the outskirts of Moscow. It’s an ele-gant three-bedroom home with wood-panelled doors and walls in fawn and grey. She describes it as “eclectic lux-ury” created with antiques and origi-nal artwork.

A runner-up in this category, DAR Designs, was com-mended for its fresh and airy scheme with a bold use of yellow throughout in a Cairo flat (plus a horse’s head – on a plinth, not in the bed). There is more

of a focus on technology in this project than in Kornilova’s apartment in Mos-cow. It features an advanced smart home system designed to turn off light-ing and air conditioning automatically when occupants leave the room. The DAR team, based in Cairo and Dubai, played to the client’s active social life and created a kitchen, living room, guest living room and dining room as

one large space. They also wanted to maintain a link with Arab culture by using home-grown crafts, such as framed sketches by local art-ists, woven baskets and ani-mal %gurines.

The winner of the best residential design over £1 million was a bit closer to home. Design %rm Fenton Whelan took home the prize for its work on the penthouse of Greybrook House, a Grade II listed building in Mayfair. The decor reflects the build-ing’s art deco design, with

stained glass windows, a marble stair-case and frameless glass balustrading. It was followed closely in the category by Orkun Indere Interiors’ log cabin in Kazan, Russia. Making the most of its high ceilings, the opulent design com-bines chalet-style timber walls, floor-to-ceiling windows and over-the-top crystal chandeliers.

Arcade-themed décor, celebrity photographs and horse statues are not to everyone’s taste, but the winners of these sort of awards tend to influence the market’s design decisions over the following year. Watch this (high-spec, lacquered) space.

taken from places that the client and his son would visit together, such as Snog, the frozen yogurt outlet in Soho,  with a fluorescent ceiling that changes colour.

The fun house transformation took Gaskin six months and much of her time was spent trying to turn concepts (such as the yellow armchair with a col-ourful feather headdress) into reality, either digging for a product she had imagined at the likes of Sunbury An-tiques Markets at Kempton Park or %nding a specialist to make it from