Abbey Cottage – Grand Designs Wirral Revisited 2025
A Grand Designs transformation: From dark bungalow to light-filled timber sanctuary.
Featured as Grand Designs Wirral Revisited 2025, Abbey Cottage is a radical reinvention of a 1960s dormer bungalow. The project challenge was to create a spacious, five-bedroom contemporary home on a strict budget (£250k).
The Challenge How do you triple the volume of a home without digging new foundations? That was the challenge at Abbey Cottage. Starting with a dilapidated, thermally failing 1960s dormer bungalow, the brief was to create a contemporary five-bedroom family home on a strict budget of just £250,000.
The Design Solution
Rather than defaulting to demolition, our strategy was radical retention. We treated the existing bungalow’s masonry shell and foundations as a “carbon asset.” By surgically removing the inefficient roof, we created a platform for a new, lightweight architectural intervention: the ‘Timber Box.’
This precise, rectilinear volume cantilevers over the original ground floor, maximizing internal space without expanding the footprint. The result is a striking transformation that turns a confused mid-century structure into a cohesive piece of modern architecture.
Interior Architecture: Volume & Light
Internally, the home is defined by a sense of openness and verticality that defies its bungalow origins. By removing the restrictive original roof, we opened up the plan to create fluid, connected living spaces. As seen in the main living area, large rooflights and floor-to-ceiling sliding glazing flood the deep-plan spaces with natural light, dissolving the boundary between the lounge and the landscaped garden deck.
A Tactile Material Palette
The interior moves beyond standard finishes to embrace honest, tactile materials that add warmth and character.
The Kitchen: A bespoke birch plywood design features exposed edge detailing and a substantial central island, acting as the social anchor of the ground floor.
The ‘Social Core’: A custom-built home bar area utilizes vertical timber boarding and industrial galvanized steel balustrades to create a distinct, playful character zone that bridges the change in floor levels.
The Staircase: Far from a standard circulation space, the stair void is treated as a timber-lined architectural feature, drawing the eye upward and emphasizing the height of the new extension.
Materiality & Budget
To deliver a ‘Grand Design’ on a modest budget (approx. £868/m²), we embraced a philosophy of ‘dematerialization.’ We stripped back the layers to reveal the beauty of the structure. The ground floor features a power-polished anhydrite screed—serving as both the heated thermal mass and the final finished surface—eliminating the cost of secondary flooring.
Externally, the building is wrapped in a breathable Corksol render and high-performance timber cladding, topped with biodiversity-enhancing green roofs.
Sustainability in Numbers
Decades ahead of its time, this 2014 project meets the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge targets today:
Embodied Carbon: 196 kgCO₂e/m² (achieved by retaining the foundations).
Operational Energy: 58.9 kWh/m²/y (achieved through ‘Fabric First’ principles).
The ‘Wirral Revisited’ episode: See the full transformation of Abbey Cottage on Grand Designs.
https://www.granddesigns.tv/wirralrevisited
The original photos from the first phase can be seen here.
https://www.bromilowarchitects.co.uk/projects/grand-designs-wirral/
