It’s not unusual to describe a house as a Tardis – meaning that it’s much bigger once you get inside than you’d think from looking at the outside. Like Dr Who’s famous police phone box.
This house is a different kind of Tardis. Sitting in the kind of leafy residential street you would find in any British town, cars neatly parked, front gardens tended, lace curtains and blinds closed, you would expect the interior to be typical too. But from the moment the front door opens the vibe is something else entirely. This is a seriously cool house.
Which isn’t really surprising when you know the owners, Beatrice Ancillon and John Alfredo Harris, who are seriously cool people, both working in the interiors world.
Paris-born Beatrice has a long-established antiques business, Ode Interiors, specialising in finely curated antique, mid-century and contemporary pieces, with a strongly European feel. John is a bespoke furniture designer and maker. This combination of skills and experience is evident in every square millimetre of the house, but the real eye-popping moment comes when you walk down the – original – teak open staircase and into the large sitting/dining room.

‘Wow’ is the only word as you take in the entire back wall of glass, looking over a terrace down a long garden, framed at the end with a line of towering mature trees, majestic against the sky.
It’s a surprisingly big garden for the scale of the house from the front – another Tardis effect – and simplifying that view was one of the key elements of transforming the house. “There were UPVC French windows and steps down to a big deck,” says Beatrice. “We made the whole wall glass and put wood cladding on the back exterior wall. “We also levelled it up, so now you step straight out onto the terrace, with no steps down. We can open the window to either side to extend the sitting room out into the garden.” Which meant they no longer needed to go to the bother of building a physical extension. “We had planned to build out from the back of the house, but once we’d made the terrace level with the sitting room, we decided we didn’t need to.” Which shows the flexible approach Beatrice likes to take to renovation. “When we start a project I know what I want to do, but it changes as you go along. It’s an intricate process, fluid but with structure.”

Another important detail in their decisions here, that makes this wall of glass so striking, was their choice of sliding doors, rather than those so-tempting entirely-opening bifolds. While this means only half the space can be open to the outside at one time, when the windows are closed – which, let’s face it, is most of the year in the UK – there is only one dividing line breaking up the view out. When bifold windows are closed there are multiple line breaks, where all the concertina-ing folds are. It ruins a view.

So while the fully-opening option may have been a good choice had this house actually been in California – rather than just feeling as though it is – for this locale, the sliding glass doors were the smarter pick. And while we are on the subject of locations, this is the second property belonging to this clever couple that I have written about for this magazine. The previous was an elegant maisonette (which had a very European feel…), close to the action of groovy Kings Road in St Leonards-on-Sea, with all its cool restaurants, cafes, galleries and shops.

“The idea was to find something bigger,” says Beatrice. “So we traded being in the thick of it for that. We wanted a detached house and now we have a spare room – and we are still only a ten minute drive from Kings Road.”
The moment they saw this house, they knew it was the one to give them that space – and their cool vibe. “It was built in 1969 and was still untouched from then, with the original parquet and panelling down the staircase. The previous owners had been here since the 1980s.”

But despite those original features, it still took a certain vision to see that potential. “The hall had 14 doors off it,” says Beatrice, laughing. “It was quite surreal, but despite that, the moment we walked through the front door we saw the potential – and we could see what the garden could be.”
The hall wasn’t the only area with too much going on – the lower level was divided into three separate rooms. “We reconfigured the whole space, plus redoing all the plumbing and electrics.”

On that lower level, they made all the fiddly little rooms into one big space, with the kitchen divided off by a central screen wall, about one third of the width of the space, so it can be entered from either side.

On the kitchen side the wall is floor to ceiling cupboards, with the work top and a run of cupboards, with an interesting rusted metal-look finish, running along the opposite wall. “It’s an ex-display kitchen we bought from Bristol.

It was enormous which gave us lots of options to reconfigure it to fit our space.” They used the wall cupboards over the worktop run without the doors, so they look like open shelving, with one door left on to visually break up the line.
To the left of the kitchen area John has created amazing doors – to hide the washing machine – in his signature style of jigsaw arrangements of rich timbers, which can be seen in his pieces all around the house. He also created the kitchen floor, a parquet of large abstract geometric shapes, made from varnished plywood – economical, very striking and a witty counterpoint to the beautiful original parquet in the sitting/dining room.

The wood panels on the whole back wall are also original and, along with the stairs create the perfect contextual space for John’s work – and a contrast to the glass and green garden view opposite. John is also the mastermind behind the garden.
Bringing it all together, green is the feature colour in the main room, with that side of the screen wall painted a gorgeous dark khaki from Little Greene – which perfectly sets off an amazing sparkly portrait of Little Richard.

They also chose green to reupholster an amazing Ligne Roset sofa, with a very appealing organic shape, which they found online for a fraction of the price. “The upholstery was very damaged, so we had it recovered, but we needed to find the right material for the rounded shape, which is a stretch loose cover. The sofa sits low, so you can gaze out at the green space and the trees in the distance.’

The dining chairs – originals by French furniture designer Pierre Guariche – are upholstered in rich green velvet and sit round an amazing dining table made by John, in one of his signature abstract geometric shapes. “We designed it together,” says Beatrice, “inspired by French designer Charlotte Perriand, who worked with Le Corbusier.” You can immediately see how the irregular shape would add dynamism to a gathering.

Upstairs on the entrance level, they converted what had been a garage into an office/spare room and sorted out that forest of doors – there are now only six. Taking some bold door decisions, they bought a new front door from eBay, which John then adjusted it to fit, and the door into the office is flush, with no frame, or trim – the kind of detail which gives this house its edge. The doors for the hall cupboard were £20 from Wickes, then sanded and varnished and given the John treatment. They also changed every window in the place.
The guest bedroom and the main bedroom are both painted strong, warm tones – saffron yellow in the guest and rich brick in the main – with the colour extending over the ceilings. “Our bedroom is southwest facing, so it can take strong colour. At first carrying it onto the ceiling seemed too much, but then it grew on me.”

In both rooms the colours are perfect for setting off the bold artworks, which in the guest room, is hung to the left of the space over the bed – not in the centre, which would have been most people’s knee jerk decision. This is just the kind of detail which shows Beatrice and John’s next-level understanding of what makes interiors sing, as opposed to just hum, and can be seen all over the house in the way objects are chosen and arranged.
Beatrice uses these skills professionally, extending her services to include interior decoration projects and working for interior design practices, sourcing special items and staging rooms for house sales – often using John’s work within them.

A perfect example of her professional eye at work is a sideboard made by John, which sits at the top of the stairs. Gathered on here are several of John’s signature wooden vessels and some geometric shapes, which echo the pattern on the doors of the sideboard, with three metal candlesticks and a monochromatic painting by late Hastings artist Peter Waldron. In one of those details, which seems small, but actually makes a big difference, the picture is leaning against the wall, rather than hung on it. Opposite the sideboard, at the top of the stairs and reflecting the same warm wood tones, is a screen of floor to ceiling teak slats. “There were glass doors in it and when we took them off it really opened up the space.”
In the shower room a whole wall is painted with a boldly coloured mural inspired by Brazilian architect and landscape designer, Roberto Burle Marx. Combined with the green marble-tiled floor and green chamfered tiles in the shower, it links the room to the tropical feeling of the garden.

Off the main bedroom there is a walk-in clothes space – with no door, allowing a free circulation of air – and next to that they have turned a small bedroom into another bathroom, where John’s skills can be seen again in a glorious cupboard under the basin, with organically curved textured shapes. With a tree-sized pot plant – one of several in the house – sitting right next to it, once more the garden comes into the house.
Like everywhere in this house, there is a lot of thought applied with a very light hand. It never feels ‘designed’ – just right. “It’s very pleasant to live in,” says Beatrice, “very relaxed and Zen. There are no pokey spaces.”
No pokey spaces and a wealth of beauty wherever your eyes fall, whether it be inside to John’s amazing work and the professionally curated furniture and artworks, or outside to that surprising garden view. An urban oasis indeed.

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