Inside Berdoulat: A History-Filled 18th-Century Shop & House | Design Notes

thank you [Music] we moved to Bath just over 10 years ago we're familiar with this street and this particular shop and actually would often walk past and kind of say wow imagine if one day this place became available and then it did [Music] so this is home to myself my wife our two children and our two doggies we love the relationship between the shop and living quarters you know this is the commute through this door here but it is lovely having that connection with what we do professionally and home life so the name of the practice bear delat comes from the name of the house I grew up in in Southwest France and it was an 18th century Farmhouse that my parents bought in a ruined State we then as a family we we kind of worked on the restoration of the place together I think that's where I caught the bug for working with ancient buildings and really gained a passion for interior design working with Furniture objects and decoration so originally in the 18th century the shop would have had a completely different format there'd have been just a small shop in the front room of the Terrace building but in 1890 three very eccentric victorians joined forces one was a restaurateur another a high-end grocer and the third a wine merchant and they formed cater staffel and Fort which became known as the fortnums of the west but what they did with the building was to completely reformat the space so all of the internal walls at ground and first floor were removed as was the the ceiling to create this fantastic double-headed space that we enjoy today when we took on the the restoration project a lot of the glazed vitrines here were actually all in pieces up in the attic the shells that hold these jars we found in a neighbor's garage and then wherever we have introduced mahogany to sort of make good and replace missing drawers and so on and so forth we've left that mahogany without any varnish finish so as to tell the story of the restoration the kitchen is the real heart of the home this is the area where we spend most of our time and the space that sees the most action the main kitchen space can actually be furnished with pieces of furniture in their own right so for example the sink dresser here the dining table there they've got plenty of space to to breathe so one of the benefits of using a rack like this is when you've done the washing up it drips dry which means you don't have to put it away so not only do we use a lot of the products that we sell in the shop in our home but also some of the items that we've lived with for years and years have informed products that we now sell in the shop so for example this cheese strainer which is probably 19th century salt glaze was always by the side of the sink and we would just put our Cutlery in it to drip dry and Neri one day said well this is a really good idea for a product why don't we just create a product that can be sold for that purpose we are the heart of our kitchen our punch gray then we decided to put this glazing doors we had a massive space with the old beautiful dresser here we wanted to feel relaxed and out of the Clutter they keep everything almost on a little Zone where once you open the door you could see on the shelves very colorful and fun a bit of the kitchen too [Music] immediately on from the kitchen is our living room I'm not going to show you the whole Space because our puppy has gradually worked her way through most of the furniture so far she's eaten two armchairs and the best part of her a sofa but one piece of furniture that luckily she's yet to eat is this bath dresser which is one of the pieces of furniture we make here you can see it being put to full use and I I love family dresses that are just riddled with you know everyday life whether it's cards whether it's our daughter's Willow pattern plate that she did kids pens and paint brushes and I just love seeing pieces of furniture like this that are full of action this is a space that is directly above the the kitchen area when designing the extension we wanted to reference the shop hence this is almost like a a kind of echo of the format of the shop space with the the double height area in the middle so you can see if you look around the space there on on that side there is an external wall with the two sash windows that's now one of the children's bedrooms with their beautiful Fanny shorter fabric Roman blinds this is actually my favorite room in the house when I come with my cup of coffee and sit and just gather my thoughts the light was the main thing in this room Focus this is the room where we relax and also come up with ideas and chat with commission claroda great ceramic artist to make this almost curricultural representation of us and we build these niches to head sculptures to go in especially so this bookcase is the prototype for another one of our pieces of furniture that we make which is a sort of modular design that can be any length and can be any depth and we do um with a sort of fixed cupboard below as well which is quite useful for hiding away all the board games but this particular one has the inscription along the top which relates to this space which we decided to dedicate to my mum who passed away whilst we were in the process of doing the build you can see that every so often there is a gilded letter which means as you walk along it spells out her name Rosie so it's quite lovely for us as we come and go through this space every day we're reminded of of her another thing in in this room which is one of my favorite possessions are these blocks that illustrate various joints and these were made by our friend Marcus who I'm fortunate enough to have worked with for the best part of 20 years and it was uh through Marcus that I I really gained a good understanding of joinery techniques which has been a really important thing for me as a as a Furniture designer it's a room that connects all the disparate parts of the building and of family life [Music] foreign [Music] above the shop and this is our bedroom it's a space that we love being in and we've tried to hang pictures in this space on numerous occasions they find very difficult to find the right piece for this room isn't it it's just on pause at the moment the green on the walls is bedlat green which is a color that we worked on together with far and ball but we can't really take the credit for the color itself because all that we did was to color match the original Georgian green probably an arsenic based paint and we absolutely love the color so we really wanted to complement and contrast the green with something quite different so we bought this piece of furniture and painted it using Edward bulmer's red ocher and instead of using an eggshell we use the Emulsion finish and then added a clear beeswax to it which gives this really beautiful texture it's almost like the the palm of your hand very very soft which I think is really lovely when you're engaging with a piece of furniture and touching it and and you know every day is one of our absolute favorite colors Halloween pieces are very important for us and this is this piece from my mom's diary and she weaved herself and she died all this incredible colors with the root vegetables and the plants so something we absolutely cherish is being eaten by moth terribly but recently we got a friend who is a incredible needle worker so she is restored for us thank you [Music] so one of my favorite parts of the shop is up on the top floor where we are here where we've got our plaster cast gallery and this is a collection that we've worked on with Alexander Griffin who's casts everything that you see here and we're actually growing The Collection all the time so for example this piece we made last year which is part of a fireplace that Balcom Court in Bradford on even just just down the road and we want it to include bits of local architecture from buildings in and around bath [Music] foreign so we're now down in the vaults underneath the shop this is the original kitchen from the 18th century servants quarters and it was when we came down here that Mary and I got really excited about the building when we first saw the place we didn't actually talk to one another we just gave each other these kind of knowing looks but we've tried down here to restore it with quite a light touch so as to preserve the the ancient feel of the space we have created this pendant light fitting with feldspar which has a ceiling Rose that's inspired by canale de Bordeaux which is one of my absolute favorite French patisseries I'm not quite sure how we got on to using that as our inspiration but as we got talking together about the design we realized we all deeply loved this Patisserie and thought that it should somehow inform the design they're very very fine and when the light shines through the bone china the whole thing has this beautiful glow to it which we really love [Music] we love the way in which right next to the shop there's our family home where a lot of the furniture we sell in the shop is actually being used in real life so it's really lovely to have those items for sale one side of the door and on the other side of the door they're being used daily in a family context [Music] foreign

Channel: House & Garden

Views: 236,323

Keywords: apartment tour, berdoulat, bright design ideas, country house, decoration ideas, design notes, design tips, english manor house, grade-ii listed building, home decor, home furniture, home tour, house & garden, house & garden design notes, house and garden, house garden, house tour, how to interior design, interior design inspiration, interior designer tour, living room design, lounge design, manor house, modern house design, shophouse, shophouse tour

Id: sQGyUhoA-5Y

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023