LOW POINT
M
ost people wouldn’t have given the
dilapidated old cottage on the edge of
a busy main road a second glance. It
was damp, dark and crumbling after years of
neglect, and the garden was completely
overgrown.
Despite this, Clare and Mark Gittins saw
beyond the dilapidation of the 18th century
former toll house. Although it had everything
going against it – including its location in a
green belt area and associated restricted
covenants – the couple saw huge potential in
the old stone walls.
“We spent two years looking for the right
house in the right place at the right price, and
found nothing we liked,” says IT consultant
Mark. “We had put in a number of offers on
other houses but nothing stuck. Then we came
across this one.”
Clare recalls their initial impressions: “It was
a nightmare,” she says. “There were steel
shutters over the windows, no floors, a couple
of awful extensions at the back and everything
inside had been wrecked.”
In spite of its condition, an open dayattracted 30 prospective buyers – all of whom
fell by the wayside once they realised it came
with tight restrictions. This opened the way for
Mark and Clare’s £120,000 offer, which they
withdrew after friends and family told them
they “must be mad”.
But the thought of breathing new life into
the cottage gnawed away at the couple until
they re-submitted their offer, knowing they
were taking a huge gamble.
“We were effectively buying three stone
walls,” says Mark, “but we wanted a big
garden and we liked the views from the back of
the house. We were prepared to work hard to
achieve what we wanted.”
But what they wanted – and envisaged – for
their new home wasn’t what the owners of the
estate on which it sits had in mind.
“We actually wanted to build a light, modern
house with lots of glass,” says Mark. After
several meetings with architects they invited
Sheffield-based architect Paul Testa to draw up
the design and submit it to planning. “Paul
really understood what we were after – three
bedrooms and an open plan living space withDOUBLED
The new build part of the
house has almost doubled the
size of the original 250-year-old
cottage but blends almost
seamlessly into the old“Thinking we had
planning permission for
the house we originally
wanted only to have our
hopes dashed on the day
the building work began.”
–Mark & Clare Gittins
july/august 2019 http://www.sbhonline.co.uk 21