REAL HOME
We gave this oldfashioned house a minimalist makeover After being priced out of their ideal location, Faye and Dean Noble took a chance on a project property that, while not in their preferred area, had potential aplenty
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fter four exciting years living in Dubai, Faye and her husband, Dean, decided they were ready to move back to England. When the pair emigrated in 2007, their eldest child, Jessica, was a one-year-old toddler. By the time they had decided to return, around nine years ago, they had welcomed their second child, Jake, so more space was high on their list of priorities when they began looking for a house. A generous garden and an interior layout that could provide comfortable family living without everyone falling over each other were also among Faye’s preferences but, try as she might, she couldn’t find a property with them in her preferred area. Making no headway with the search, Faye and Dean relented and began to look in other locations nearby. Not long after, the couple found a winner. ‘The house neighbouring my twin sister’s home in south-east Essex became available, and it was just too good an opportunity to miss,’ says Faye. ‘It wasn’t in our preferred location and needed a lot of love, but I knew the area well, having grown up there. I also knew that in order to get a similar property in our preferred area, we’d have to pay double the price and would still need to put in all the renovating work.’ Faye could see through the property’s somewhat garish and dated décor to the potential that lay beneath and, after weighing their options, the couple decided to make it their new family home. But making the decision was the easy part because, with no previous experience of renovating a property, making their new home comfortable would be a challenging undertaking for Faye and Dean – especially with two young children. ‘We had only ever lived in new-builds before we bought this house, so we had never taken on such a huge project,’ says Faye.
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The house needed a number of major structural improvements: the upstairs rooms had to be rejigged to make space for a bigger bathroom; there was an old mahogany conservatory that had to be ripped out; and the kitchen needed remodelling so that French doors could be added to allow light into what was a dark space. There were also many cosmetic alterations that Faye wanted to make, such as removing the dark, floral carpets and changing the avocado-green bathroom suite. None of these jobs were easy tasks, especially as the house
was occupied while the jobs were in progress. ‘We decided to live in the house while it underwent renovation, which, at times, was very difficult with young children,’ Faye recalls. ‘We would hop from room to room, sleeping and living in whichever one wasn’t undergoing work, until the bulk of the jobs were finished. It took over a year.’ Despite being short on renovating experience, Faye and Dean both have great eyes for interior design and knew exactly how they wanted their home to look. Dark, mahogany units were ripped out of the
