THE PROBLEM

An Edwardian country house in the Weald of Kent, with exceptional bones: five bedrooms, mature gardens, and almost everything in need of attention. The brief arrived as ‘a decorative refresh’. The reality was a complete renovation. There were two further complications. The deadline was eleven months — a realistic timeframe was eighteen — and it was not moving. And my clients, a banker and a lawyer with three young children, would be largely unreachable during the working week. The contractor — talented, meticulous, and taking on his first very large project — was the one who brought me in.

THE INTERVENTION

I built the project around the clients’ real availability rather than the availability a project like this normally assumes: The occasional Saturday morning on site, Sunday evening calls, every decision made, recorded and acted upon. In between, I represented the clients to the contractor and the contractor to the clients, so that neither side was ever waiting on the other. I coached the contractor through the project management discipline the deadline demanded: dependencies mapped, trades sequenced, the critical path visible to everyone. When the schedule came under pressure, my message was direct: throw money at it or throw people at it, because the date is not moving. The kitchen moved to an adjacent former dairy. The clients’ one immovable instruction: the original Delft tiles stay. They stayed — carefully restored — in a kitchen that went on to feature in 25 Beautiful Homes and be shortlisted for an industry award.