coombes : everitt Your Home Subterranean swimming in a regency villa
Subterranean swimming in a regency villa
The brief
Our clients had purchased a regency villa in central Cheltenham and were keen to accommodate an indoor swimming pool and leisure suite, and to create some additional living space for their young and growing family.
Key challenges
The main challenge was to accommodate a state-of-the-art leisure facility within the confines of a classic Cheltenham regency villa. The very low ceiling height in the loft space also required some clever thinking to allow for the extra bedrooms requested by the client.
Our solution
To meet our client’s brief, we designed a two-storey contemporary extension as well as excavating the basement and re-configuring the existing attic space to create three new bedrooms.
The extension, which houses the leisure suite, sits at 90 degrees to the main house. Overtly contemporary in design to provide a complete contrast to the regency villa, it projects into the garden, providing a link that enables the family to enjoy it in a way they could not previously. The garden has been landscaped to slope down to ensure that there is plenty of natural light entering the pool at lower ground floor level, and when the weather permits the glazed wall to the pool opens out onto a sunken terrace for alfresco dining.
In the attic, we raised the roof on the original property and reworked the space to provide three new bedrooms including a guest suite. To improve access, the main staircase was continued up through the house and the inclusion of a large roof light above the staircase brings plenty of natural light down into the centre of the property.
“coombes;everitt took the worry out of the design process for us. We weren’t sure we could get what we wanted in the space we had, but their ideas overcame every obstacle we presented them with.”
