News — house

With a hint of retro and a touch of rustic,this former farmhouse is now a stylish place to live and work for Christen Pears and Chris Blake. Moving to the UK from Australia, Christen Pears and Chris Blake had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted from their new home. ‘We were specifically looking for a property with holiday cottages,’ says Christen. ‘I travelled ahead of Chris with an agreed list of nine properties to view in Cornwall and Devon. But that search stopped short after the very first viewing. This house ticked so many boxes and felt so...

Once a chaotic student house, Kibi Wright’s elegant home is now the perfect setting for peaceful celebrations with family and friends. Best buy ‘The table in the hall, which I made from stone plinths and toughened glass’. Call me Mother Christmas – it’s what I’m known as around here,’ says Kibi Wright as she welcomes you into her house on one of Bristol’s Georgian terraces. Candy pink and adorned with a silver wreath, the door stands out among its more sober neighbours. Inside, the festive theme continues with candles, garlands, baubles and a vertigo-inducing tree glowing with fairy lights in...

Janet and Paul Gleeson have filled their south Dorset village house with an eclectic assortment of antiques, modern art and trophies from their travels. The first thing I remember about the house was walking into the drawing room and thinking, “This is fabulous”,’ says Janet Gleeson of the moment she and husband Paul first viewed the house that would become their family’s Dorset home. ‘It was a big step because we had always lived in London. We hardly knew anyone in Dorset and until then we’d worried we were doing the wrong thing. But the children had left home and...

WHEN ELTE’S KEN AND RENEE METRICK FINALLY DECIDED TO EMBRACE COTTAGE LIVING, THEY BUILT A CONTEMPORARY RETREAT THAT’S AS PERSONAL AND POLISHED AS THEIR ICONIC STORES. IF IT'S RARE TO FIND a family that can work together, it’s rarer stillto find one that, atthe end of a long workweek, can’t waitto getto the cottage to spend more time together. Ken and Renee Metrick and their sons, Andrew and Jamie, are the third and fourth generation of Metricks overseeing Elte,the wildly successful Toronto-based home decorating juggernautfounded by Ken’s grandfather 100 years ago in 1919.Almost a century later, in 2015, the family...

For 23 years, Dominic Monaco avoided his garden, but who could blame him? “It was a mini forest on a tilted slope,” he says, describing the tangle of overgrown cedars that grew on the incline just behind his home in Westmount, Que. When he did brave his side yard, he had to walk down steep stairs that led to a small, dark terrace with crumbling stone walls. In 2016, Dominic, who runs an auto parts company, finally decided to tackle the mess. “I thought maybe I would fix the wall and do the rest in phases,” he says. That short-term...