Come Inside: How Our New Build Became Home

The living room is the room that came together fastest once we moved in - it became comfortable within weeks, not months.

The curtains were one of the moments when the house genuinely began to feel finished and private. Before they went up, every room still felt slightly like it belonged to no one in particular. Once they were hung, that stopped. The black shutters gave us privacy even earlier - they were fitted in the first week, well before the curtains arrived, and meant we never had a stretch of feeling exposed to the street.

Warm, indirect lighting does most of the work in how this room feels. It’s built around the television cabinetry rather than relying on a single ceiling light - a slim floor lamp, integrated lighting and a scattering of smaller warm sources instead of one bright overhead fixture. The atmosphere genuinely changes through the day: brighter and more functional in the morning, low and warm by evening.

The materials in here are deliberately warm and calm - wood tones, soft textiles, nothing too polished. This is not a room we’re trying to keep looking finished. It’s a room we live in.

A home doesn’t really prove itself in the photographs you take when everything is tidy. It proves itself on the ordinary evenings - feet up, the television on, nothing particularly styled for a photograph.

If you asked me where the best money in this house went, my answer is the kitchen, without much hesitation. I would choose this exact layout again.

It was planned around how we would actually use it, not around how a showroom kitchen looks in a brochure. Tall cabinetry holds the full-size fridge, the ovens and a good amount of storage in one run, so none of it competes for counter space. There’s a full freezer rather than a small drawer version, a Bora cooktop, a Quooker, and Siemens connected appliances throughout.

The storage itself was planned drawer by drawer around what actually needed to live where: a proper spice drawer, pull-out storage for pots and pans, a separate section for baking equipment. None of it was left to be figured out after the cabinets arrived.

The worktop is a thick wood-look surface rather than real wood - a deliberate choice. It gives the visual warmth I wanted without the maintenance I didn’t want to sign up for. There’s hidden lighting above the tall cabinets and worked in around the champagne-toned grip details, so the room still feels considered once the overhead lights are off.

Not every premium feature earned its place. One of our ovens has a steam function I have barely used. It’s a useful reminder that expensive doesn’t automatically mean useful - plan routines before cabinetry, not the other way round.

One of my favourite parts of the kitchen is also one of the smallest. We planned the coffee corner before the kitchen existed, because we already knew exactly what would happen here every morning.

It’s a proper dedicated spot - open shelving, lighting built in and largely hidden from view, sockets exactly where the machine needed to sit. The coffee equipment has a permanent place rather than living wherever there happened to be counter space, and it gets used every single day.

It’s a very small decision in the scheme of an entire new-build. It’s also one we use more than almost anything else in the house.

The bathroom is the room I’d point to for both halves of this article - what worked, and what I’d change.

We enlarged the bathroom by roughly 40cm, at the expense of bedroom space next door. That decision made room for a freestanding bath without the room ever feeling cramped - something I’d wanted for years. I use it roughly weekly in winter, less often in summer, and I’d choose it again without hesitation.

The double basins were also worth it - not because they’re more luxurious, but because there’s no longer a queue, or an argument about whose things are on whose side. The large round illuminated mirror and the overhead rain shower with a separate hand shower are both decisions I’d make again too. The bronze and gold-toned fixtures do a lot of the work in making the room feel warm rather than clinical. The sunshower has become a genuine personal comfort for me - purely a lived experience, not a claim about what it does for anyone else.

What I’d change is the tile. We went lighter and whiter than I’d actually pictured, and it came out of a showroom appointment and advice process that didn’t properly match my vision that day. It isn’t that the white tile is wrong in any objective sense - it’s that it isn’t quite mine. Next time, I’d likely lean more taupe, and I’d seriously consider tiling only part of the room and using plaster or stuc elsewhere - partly for the look, partly because a smaller tiled area is easier to change your mind about later.

The lesson I took from that appointment: if it’s going badly, don’t make a permanent finish decision just to get the appointment finished.

Part of our attached garage was divided off and turned into a home office. I work there every single day.

It’s a structural decision, not a styling one - and it’s exactly the kind of choice that would have been disruptive, if not impossible, to create after moving in. This is the purest example in the whole house of spending on everyday value rather than on how a room photographs: I would make this decision again without hesitation.

It’s easy to spend a build’s entire attention on the rooms you’ll sit in and forget the ones you only pass through. We tried not to.

The entrance and stairs carry the same warm taupe-and-brown palette as the rest of the ground floor, and the same attention to lighting - practical where you need to see what you’re doing, softer everywhere else. (The smart lighting and sensor planning that makes the wider house work at night without ever feeling harshly lit is its own story - see the smart-home decisions guide elsewhere in this Edit.)

None of this is dramatic. It’s just proof that the rooms you walk through on the way to somewhere else still shape how a house feels, even if no one photographs them first.

The garden is the clearest example in the whole house of a decision we deliberately let wait.

Not everything needed to be finished before we moved in, and the garden’s decorative layer was one of the things we consciously postponed. What we didn’t postpone was the infrastructure underneath it: outdoor taps planned for both the front and back of the house, and outdoor lighting wired in early, before any paving or planting existed to build around. Preparation like that matters even - especially - when the finished garden is still months away.

The covered outdoor area and terrace came together gradually, and the ground around them is still, honestly, a work in progress in places. We’re still choosing paving by holding sample stones up against the actual light, rather than deciding from a catalogue.

This isn’t a “finished garden” story. It’s proof that the final decorative layer can wait - the expensive, disruptive-to-change decisions were the ones we made early instead.

Very little of what I’d change about this build is structural. In fact, most of the expensive decisions we made during the process are the ones I would make again.

The kitchen. Turning part of the garage into the office I use every working day. Enlarging the bathroom for the bath. The bath itself, and the double basins. The lighting plan, built around the rooms rather than added afterwards. The extra electrical points, and the empty conduits we ran through the foundations for things we hadn’t decided on yet - they’ve since been useful for the EV charger and garden electrics. The early preparation for smart lighting. The outdoor taps, front and back. The solar panels. Getting privacy - shutters, then curtains - sorted early rather than late. Using a professional painter rather than trying to do that ourselves alongside everything else. And, less obviously, spending real attention on lighting as its own decision rather than a decorative afterthought.

None of that means everyone should make the same choices we did. It means that, for us, almost every expensive decision turned out to be about everyday value, not about looking impressive on a spec sheet.

What I’d change is surprisingly less about the expensive structural decisions and more about finishes, timing, and a few things that sounded useful on paper.

The bathroom tile is the clearest example - not because it’s a bad tile, but because I let a difficult showroom appointment push me towards a permanent decision I hadn’t actually settled on. The cast garage floor is a similar story: I like the colour, but the execution didn’t come out the way I’d hoped, and it’s not something worth staying annoyed about at this point. The oven’s steam function is the smaller version of the same lesson - a premium feature that sounded useful and has barely been touched since.

If I changed anything about the process itself, it would be building more buffer time between handover and moving day. Build delays have a way of eating directly into whatever finishing time you’d planned for yourself.

The strange thing is that the house didn’t become home on the day the last important building decision was made.

It happened in smaller moments.

When the curtains finally went up. When we stopped thinking about where the light switches were, because the lighting simply worked. When the coffee corner became part of every morning. When there were things on surfaces that hadn’t been styled for a photograph.

There are still things we could change. There probably always will be.

But that’s also the point.

A house doesn’t need to be completely finished before it can feel completely yours.

And if I could go back to the beginning of the build, the biggest thing I would tell myself is not to try to predict every object we would eventually own.

I’d plan the life first.

The rooms followed.

If you’re still at the stage where most of your home exists on plans, samples and very long lists of decisions, The New Home Studio is the workbook I wish we’d had while making ours.