Beach House-Style Home

Stripping It To Its Skeleton
Bringing In The Architects
Private Living

It's hard to see it now, but before Caz Wray got her hands on her wonderful beach house-style home, it was a sad 1960s building, crying out for a makeover...

Even as a child, Caz Wray had a huge fascination for property. 'I used to climb over walls to look at derelict houses and visualise how I would improve them,' she says. Now she does a grown-up version of the same thing - searching out sad, lonely homes, ripe for transformation.

Thanks to years of experience - Caz has taken on 15 renovations so far - she knew the moment she saw the unsightly 1960s, brick-built bungalow with its dark, dated interior that it was perfect for an overhaul. 'It was full of small poky rooms, just crying out for some TLC and exactly what I wanted,' she recalls.

The kitchen has plenty of storage with high-gloss white units (find similar at Ikea) and a worktop in iroko. The iroko bookcase that acts as a room divider was specially made to suit the space. The 1960s lamp is from London Lighting.

On this occasion, rather than going for a neglected building that was architecturally beautiful, Caz chose a home that she could change both externally and internally. 'The advantage of this bungalow is that it's detached, so the external work didn't conflict with other styles,' she says of her home in south west London.

Caz's plan was to strip back the bungalow to its skeleton and treat it as a new-build. Although the footprint of the house stayed the same, everything else disappeared - the roof, windows and all the internal walls. 'Only the outer walls were left and at one stage I even had foxes squatting here,' says Caz, who managed the work from her Brighton house, a previous project.