Inside A Former Ice-Cream Factory: Transformed Into a Modern Country House | Design Notes

Russell Pinch and Oona Bannon welcome us into their modern country house, fully converted from a former ice-cream factory, nestled in the rolling hills of the Devon countryside. Buried many pages deep on _The Modern House’s_ listings page was a dilapidated ice-cream factory not far from the south Devon coast, with planning permission for conversion into a family home.

“We weren’t in the market for a project,” says Oona . ‘We had already given 10 years of our life to building a house in France.” But, a few days later, they drove down to Devon — ‘just to have a peek.’ What they found, tucked in a valley near Torquay, would have held little promise to most: a cob barn strewn with ivy and some rickety lean-tos. Watch the full episode of ‘Design Notes’ as we tour Russell & Oona’s country house, winner of House & Garden’s Project of the Year, 2024.

#CountryHouse #ModernHouse #Countryside

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I don’t know what it is about the land and the lay lines and something here that we all have this immediate feeling of um we’re [Music] home one Saturday morning Russell was lying in bed looking at the modern house and on page 46 there was a listing of a field and an old ice cream factory you could buy it with the potential to build a house and it was a kind of revery it was a silly dream and we drove the 4 and 1/2 hours to get here and we stood in the field and looked back at the project which was really an idea and a kind of few sheds that were falling down and we thought well it’s not for us but actually ended up being exactly for us didn’t it yeah and we signed up and we bought it and we built the house we are in South Devon the countryside we’re in is beautiful here it’s really deep Rolling Valley it’s an Escape it’s a perfect perfect escape from our Urban extremely busy life we don’t get down here as often as we like but that’s only because we’d want to be here all the time we want to leave on a Friday have every moment here and leave as late as we can on a Sunday one of the planning constraints we had was to make sure that we didn’t go higher than the original cob Barn so the way in which we’ve gone around that is by digging into the ground which makes the kitchen actually subterran what that means is you feel like you are literally in the garden um and it’s just such a lovely view to look up and actually feel as though you’re immersed into the countryside we’ve designed a couple of kitchens in our time um under the radar not under the pinch brand and this is probably a good representation of it because we’ve we’ve honed our skills and finally got it right on this one the kitchen is one long room which has a Pantry located in the center something that we always wanted and finally got we’ve used Douglas fur throughout which you can see the grain everywhere which looks fantastic it’s not the most durable of surfaces but if you’re willing to allow wood to grow old disgracefully then it’s just beautiful We Believe quite strongly that you don’t have to have all one wood in one area and I think this is a really good example of that we’ve got Oak uh Cherry Ash Walnut Douglas fur actually working really well together and not trying to be all one species in one place we’re not afraid to uh to mix our Timber metaal I think there’s a whole kind of attitude that we wanted to adopt in this household which is about it just being a little bit careless not needing for everything to be pristine and looked after I really wanted this to be a house that you could wear your Welles into the kitchen and I think the furniture needs to have that same sort of principle that it’s hard wearing it’s kind of has a solidity and so the me dining table is much more of a robust table compared to some of our other finer pieces and it suits the space bace and the use much better but one that you could probably dance on Main objective on the interior design of the piece was to soften everything and bring some warmth to the space cuz all of this concrete and white and the breeze block walls obviously by their nature are very utilitarian so bringing in textiles which have great contrast on the walls or contrast in the black Timber framed windows or something really quite fun and colorful like this Mexican piece of artwork as you might imagine as furniture designers um we’ve filled the house with our own Furniture this piece in particular was a oneoff piece that was designed for an exhibition in New York and it just sits so beautifully the Curves in the background we filled the entire house pretty much with pieces that we found from interesting places I mean even this little gold framed plan I’m not even sure what the building is but it’s the tonal beauty of it and the gold frame on it is so beautiful Russell and I are in constant debate uh how much stuff we have in our home so a library is a great opportunity open shelving to keep all these little bits and Bobs sometimes their personal motifs often they are books quite often they’re pieces of pottery drawings that the kids have done years ago and I like to be reminded of them some of my favorite pieces in the house are the speakers that my mom gave me that I grew up with so they really fill this whole space with music music’s actually quite a big thing in this house we have quite a lot of family discos another thing is a bust by Willie sucr so a very beautiful terra cotta piece obviously lots of books on design and this model was really important because actually when you’re building a modern house it’s really important to remember the end game because the process can actually be quite demanding and it is possible in all the discussion on budgets Etc to lose the joy so this for us represented a very visual aid Memoir of what the game was it helped us realize that the journey might be hard but the sweetener at the end is definitely worth [Music] it so this is the oldest part of the building it’s the original cob bar which was also the original Ice Cream Factory cob is a really old way of building using I believe straw and mud and stones and then inside it we’ve kept this section looking as original as possible so has the full height inside exposed beams and everything is just whitewashed inside so quite a monastic feel to the space we’ve then got um three openings through to the new part of the building which is adjoining this old cob bar I think generally the whole house is very simple in its Furnishings uh quite United in its palette and materials but this room I think particularly is the most simple and we took a lot of inspiration from leou paragan and here’s house in Mexico in the bedroom which was simply a bed and a chair and I think maybe a rosary which we don’t know and it’s very much about the view there’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to living with a 2 m x 2 me window we’re also Southwest facing so we get a lot of sunshine in the morning so you kind of rise with the sun and settle with the sun and we were considering blackouts but actually you have to give yourself over to the elements sometimes that’s how we felt in this house so we just open for a really simple white linen curter which means means that you wake up early and you see the view which is a wonderful thing even though this room itself is quite small we have a similar size space just here which is our bathroom with the similar size window uh so actually you get quite a large space in this monster Suite we wanted a beautiful bath and we did actually try to find one second hand but we couldn’t get one that had good enough finish so in the end we went to a quite well-known bath and Retail and got one of their pieces but we changed up the feet to have the bath raised off the ground it gives much more sense of space and Poise this painting is by a good friend of our called anesa and I absolutely adore this painting it’s so simple and it was really important because there’s so much sunlight in this room that we found a painting that could cope with that amount of UV so she Paints in oils um and that’s able to withstand the amount of sunshine that comes in the the garden design we work with James Hamilton who very cleverly has designed a series of perennial Beds which closer to the house feel more manicured but then start to bleed out into a lot of wild Meadow and then that then bleeds out further into the field and later into the uh Forest so it doesn’t feel like we’ve just landed a garden into the countryside it feels like it’s part of the countryside I don’t think there’s anything more beautiful than a vegetable patch and so we decided to put that at the front of the house rather than at the back of the house hidden away uh so you actually have to travel through the vegetable patch to go to our front door we’re growing all the seasonal vegetables throughout the year um and eating as many of them as [Music] possible building a house from scratch is something that you can only understand when you’ve done it it takes incredible belief and it’s a journey that you you don’t really know where it’s going to end up you can see plans you can build builds a model it’s this kind of dream that feels like it’s almost like when you wake up and you can’t quite remember a dream but you know you had a good dream it’s that same sort of promise you know it’s going to be good but it’s it’s not quite in focus and the reality of being in this house is better than any dream that I could have had [Music]