Homecoming heroes

Coming back to Scarborough after three years in Canada proved an emotional time for Gillian Martin and her family, not least because the house they left behind no longer felt like home.

The detached Victorian villa had been let while they were away and the tenants had left their own mark on it. The solution was a major makeover that has given the house a fresh identity and provided Gillian, husband Bill and daughter Miranda, 13, with a layout that works perfectly.

With help from Bill’s sister, Pauline Hart Chaplin, an experienced interior designer, they transformed the space.

“We bought the house in 1999 because we loved the location and it had potential. We did it up a bit then but the layout was never quite right. It just didn’t flow. We also needed to do some work after the tenants moved out so we decided to do everything at once,” says Gillian, a well-known illustrator.

The project started before they arrived back, so they were greeted with rooms full of dust and rubble.

“They started knocking walls down while we were still in Toronto, which was scary because I was hundreds of miles away wondering whether what was on paper would work in practice. It was still a building site when we got back so we rented a flat at The Sands development in Scarborough, which was fantastic,” she says.

Three months later, when the structural work was done and the kitchen had been fitted, they moved back in. What was a kitchen, tiny breakfast room that was rarely used and a separate dining room, have been opened into one large kitchen and dining area. Division has been cleverly created by leaving the chimney breast in the dining room. Downstairs in the basement, Miranda now has her own bedsit with bathroom.

“Pauline was brilliant. She could see what needed to be done with the layout and she brought a fantastic builder, Paul Avenal, to do the work,” says Gillian.

The kitchen is from B&Q and Paul fashioned the island from some of the units. Bill laid the flooring and all the decorating was done by Gillian, who spent an exhausting few months getting up at the crack of dawn and carrying on into the night, emulsioning the walls in a combination of Dulux Jasmine white and some colourful Farrow and Ball. Her skills extend to painting furniture and she has upcycled a number of vintage pieces, including a 1930s cupboard in the dining room and a display cabinet in the sitting room.

The house is full of candles and fairy lights, which create atmosphere, accessories from her favourite shop, Homebird House in Scarborough, and her own colourful, figurative and abstract paintings.

“My illustration work is small scale and usually to someone else’s brief, so I’ve always enjoyed the freedom of being able to paint for myself on a larger scale, and I love colour,” says Gillain, whose studio is in one of the five bedrooms upstairs. Before she moved away, she had a base 
at Woodend, the birthplace 
of Edith Sitwell, which now provides creative workspace for artists and makers.

“I loved it at Woodend, but I couldn’t justify going back when I could have the studio here,” she says.

Gillian works on her illustrations for books, paints, mainly for pleasure and her own home, and is busy developing new ideas for designing home décor and printing her own fabrics.

The studio, she says is “an explosion” while the rest of the house is calm and uncluttered.

Most of the furniture was shipped out to Canada and then back again. She also imported some additions and ideas. The couple moved there with Bill’s job, as he works for McCain, a Canadian company with a factory in Scarborough.

“Everything is bigger out there because there is so much space. We bought our huge emperor size bed out there and brought it back,” says Gillian.

The idea for a walk in closet, fashioned from Miranda’s old nursery, was also imported from Canada and the sitting room is modelled on a ski lodge with fur throws, wood floor and lots of candles.

The moose in the kitchen is a reminder of their time abroad, as are the gold reindeer in the dining room, which are Christmas decorations.

“Canada has definitely had an influence on this house. We loved it out there but it is very different from the English landscape,” says Gillian. “In summer, believe it or not, it gets incredibly hot, so the ground is quite parched. I really missed the seasons we have here.”

• Gillian Martin, www.gillianmartinillustration.weekly.com; www.artmarketillustration.com