For some, the idea of creating a home from scratch may seem daunting, but for former costume designer Gina Portman, building anew allowed her to make the move to the countryside she’d long wanted. Having left London with her family almost 18 years ago for the coastal town of Rye, Gina hankered for something a little more rural and when a plot came up just three miles away in the east Sussex countryside, it provided just the spot to create a contemporary barn-like house. Here, she talks to us about how her ideas found form and why she can never quite commit to furnishing the space.

Gina: “I grew up in north London, but I’d always wanted my children to experience the countryside growing up. We moved to Rye in 2002 and lived on a hill in a 19th-century house, with high ceilings and a huge staircase. It was beautiful, but it was near a main road and I wanted to be in the countryside.

“My husband, Andrew, said he’d only move if we could build our own house. One day, I was out cycling in the middle of nowhere and saw a for-sale sign at the end of a bridleway, which led to a really broken-down farmworkers’ bungalow. It was beyond saving, but the location, surrounded by fields, was hard to beat. It wasn’t overlooked by any other houses and the only traffic was horse-riders.

“Nothing particularly appealed to me about building from scratch, but I liked the idea of living in the middle of nowhere. I went home and told Andrew, and I think he was too embarrassed to say he was only joking about doing a new-build. We ended up putting an offer in!

“Andrew loves concrete brutalist architecture, but we couldn’t do that here as it’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the house had to reflect the local vernacular. We worked with England Architecture, which is run by Nick and Rosamund England, who were friends of friends and based between Rye and south London. As far as we knew, they’d never designed a home before, but they had always wanted to. We took a bit of a punt and it turned out really well in the end.

“With Rosamund and Nick, we came up with this idea for a two-storey barn covered in cedar shingles, which are often used locally for Church steeples and bus shelters. The idea was that it would look a bit like an armadillo, and we liked the idea that they’d turn grey over the years as the sun bleached them. If money was no object, we could have used hand-clefted oak shingles, but who can really afford that?

“One of our other references was the bird hide on Rye harbour with its oblong slot windows – I guess what makes the house look so unusual is that it resembles a really giant bird hide.

“The building itself didn’t take that long, but the demolition of the old bungalow was slow work as there were problems with asbestos. In total, the project ended up lasting about four years. We lived in a cottage nearby, before we could finally move in, in 2011. Thinking back, we were really quite naive, but we were young enough to just do it.

“Inside, we wanted the space to be incredibly open plan. It works really well with young children, and when we first moved in it meant our then small boys, Alfie and Edgar, could skateboard and cycle around the house if they wanted to.

“The idea with the layout was that you could stand in one corner, look straight across the house, and see out the other side. The windows on either side of the house mirror each other because we wanted to frame the views.

“In the kitchen and dining area, we incorporated a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, which look out onto the open countryside. Upstairs, there’s a bathroom and two bedrooms, which Alfie and Edgar use when they are visiting from London, where they are both at university.

“My initial thought was to keep the interior quite plain to contrast the exterior, which is so textural. The floors are poured concrete and we painted the walls in a cloudy limewash. At the start, I didn’t even want to put tiles in the kitchens or bathrooms because I thought there were already too many tile-like shingles outside.

“Over the years, I’ve gone against my rule and decided it can’t be too plain as I get bored. Recently, we stuck some massive old reclaimed slates behind the cooker in the kitchen and painted the wall behind a dark green, so it picks up the green flecks in the slate.

“The kitchen island is an old science block workbench, which I’ve jazzed up with some floor tiles. It’s a makeshift thing really, but I like it. One of Alfie’s friends came over a while back and said, ‘I love your house, it’s so Tintagel’, after the rugged castle in Cornwall. I quite like that and keep thinking, ‘I must be more Tintagel’.

“When we left Rye, we sold all of our furniture apart from the essential items, as we didn’t know what the house was going to look like and had no idea what would fit. The sort of interiors that I love are cosy and stuffed with things, but somehow I’ve never quite managed to achieve that here. It always ends up looking like a monastery. I love the idea of a cosy armchair, but then I ended up buying a settle, which is actually quite uncomfortable to sit on. It was one of the first pieces I bought specifically for the house and I just liked the scale of it.

“I think that interiors often come down to your internal headspace. Being here makes me feel calm. I think if you’ve got a lot going on in your head, you can’t have a lot going on around you.

“My favourite spot in the house changes depending on the season. In the summer, it’s on the decking that runs alongside the wall of glass in the kitchen-dining area, which essentially becomes another room of the house. We had the decking specially made from very narrow planks of chestnut, and it’s lovely to watch sunsets there.

“In the winter, I love the snug, with its wood burner and projector that we watch movies on. There is a sliding wall on a big roller, so you can close the snug off from the rest of the space.

“Many of the paintings around the house are by a local artist called Luke Hannam, who I’ve recently started collaborating with. We run life drawing and still life classes at a new local vineyard called Tillingham Wines and we’re hoping to start painting holidays soon too, where we go into the woods and paint obscure objects.

“People always ask me what I do and I’ve never been able to give them an answer. I stopped being a costume designer when I had children and now I put on art sales, run workshops, produce collections of candles and other homewares, and organise the annual Great Dixter Christmas Fair.

“The longer I live here the more I like it. I love walking over the Rye nature reserve and beach in all weathers. Anytime is great. Rye is lovely too and we’re close enough to go to St Leonards and Hastings when it all gets a bit too nice and you want to get a bit of grit.

“We’re thinking about changing the entire interior, just because this is the longest I’ve ever lived in a house. We’ve thought about moving, but this is quite hard to beat. I love the feeling of space and the full view of the changing seasons you get from out of the windows.”

Gina, how do you define modern living?

“Space and light.”

Is there a home for sale on our website that has caught your eye?

“Mines Park in Cambridgeshire. It looks like a modern-day version of Manderley from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.”