When we purchased our new home and new project in Aberlady it was on the back of having completed a renovation of our main door flat on Constitution street in Edinburgh. The new house was a rundown and not very successful 1960’s modernist house which clearly hadn’t appealed to anyone before us because it had been on the market for three years! The house was described by many locals as the ugliest house in the village but on entering the house Cheryl and I could immediately appreciate the potential.

We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do with the house but we did know that having completed our first renovation and through my career, we had developed the skills necessary to transform the house in ways that perhaps others had not appreciated. In all it took just under a year to design the renovations and extensions and to get the statutory application in place but once this was done we kissed goodbye to our social life for the next 4 years whilst we took on 90% of the construction works.

Gareth & Cheryl Jones at work

Evenings and weekends were dedicated to developing our designs ordering the next batch of materials and then executing the works to create a physical object. This might sound like a nightmare for many but luckily Cheryl and I are both creative people and though at times it was tough, sleeping and living in a building site with no central heating and no windows during the winter of 2010, we enjoyed the experience and the way of life. So much so that we are about to take on another project, which I suspect will be our final home.  

I think if we were to try to rationalise why we do what we do, it would have to be for the creative buzz of completely transforming houses that others may have overlooked and the opportunity to create beautiful spaces and homes.  

Keep your eye out for The Great Scottish Indoors piece to be featured in a leading interiors magazine on our home by Alison and Douglas Gibb. It was a great privilege to have had our home photographed by Douglas and to have been interviewed by Alison - I can't wait to see the finished article. 

Gareth Jones -
Director