In 2015, after almost 14 years in London, Hannah and Michael Holloway decided to sell their home in Hackney for a two-storey Georgian terrace in Bath. For Hannah, the pull was her family clothing brand, Maze, which she now runs alongside her parents; for Michael, a chef, the move allowed him to launch his own catering company, Wild Fork West, through which he cooks up delicious feasts for weddings and private events. Somehow, the pair also managed to find the time to embark on a year-long renovation project, giving the house a much-needed, but sensitive overhaul. Here, Hannah and Michael tell us why the smallest changes were often the most impactful and why balancing functionality with beauty was key to their vision.

Hannah: “We’d been in London since we both moved there for university and had a lovely Georgian cottage in London Fields. We loved the area, but we were thinking about starting a family and decided to take the plunge and move down to the South West in 2013. I came to work for Maze, our Bristol-based family clothing business, which my parents set up in 1985.

“We rented in Bath while we looked for somewhere to buy here. We started by looking at very typical, tall Bath townhouses and although we loved the architecture, we found it hard to resolve ourselves to stacked living.

“After about two years of looking, we found this two-storey Georgian house in the area of Larkhall, just to the northeast of the city. It just had this lovely feeling and although it hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, it had all the right bones.”

Michael: “One of the reasons we love Georgian houses is the sense of scale and their incredible proportions. Like most Georgian architecture, this house has an amazing sense of light in all the rooms, with high ceilings and huge fireplaces. It was built in 1830 and we’ve got all of the original documents for it on incredible bits of 200-year-old vellum. We were given them by a solicitor in town who was getting rid of some archives and tracked us down so they could pass them on.

“One of the pulls for us was the long, enclosed garden, which stretches down to a brick wall. Our terrace was built in the grounds of a former monastery where the monks used to grow grapes, so we have amazing fertile soil.”

Hannah: “All of the houses on the terrace are listed and have the same beautiful flat front. They’re quite unusually constructed with no drainpipes on the front façade, which means you have this lovely uninterrupted row of houses. Each one is painted in a different ice cream pastel colour and ours is the vanilla one.

“We bought the house in 2015 when our oldest daughter was just six months old, but we didn’t move in until a year later to give us time to renovate the house. We worked with an amazing local builder called Andrew White, who is a family friend and was key in helping us realise our vision for the house. He never put any restrictions in place, but always asked what we wanted to do and then set about finding a way to make it happen.”

Michael: “The biggest change we made was at the back of the house, where we extended out into the side return on the ground floor to create an open-plan kitchen and dining area. This part of the house was originally just two small rooms, so we opened up the space, basically taking the back of the house off to add a glass roof and two sets of Crittall doors that open out onto the garden.”

Hannah: “Originally, the house felt very dark and higgledy-piggledy, so we spent a lot of time and budget on straightening and widening corridors, lowering floors and raising ceilings. Although these were relatively small changes, I now see how they were well worth spending money on.

“Upstairs, we also made space for a beautiful walk-in shower by stealing a bit of space from a two-and-a-half-metre long airing cupboard. It’s made the house much more fluid and comfortable to live in, even though a lot of the work is probably invisible to most people.”

Michael: “Having a good kitchen was very important to me. This is the first kitchen that I’ve designed from scratch and I know from my job as a private chef that it’s very easy to get them wrong. It was really important to me that the space worked when it came to functionality and ergonomics and we tried a dozen or more iterations before we committed to the final design. I’d be acting out all of the various kitchen processes to see how the space could be best laid out!

“For Hannah, the aesthetics were really important, so it was about marrying this with something practical. In the end, we went for a deVol kitchen, which manages to be both functional and beautiful.”

Hannah: “I have a very clear aesthetic sensibility, which is very much inspired by the way that we put clothes together at Maze. It comes through in the house in the way that we’ve chosen to juxtapose diverse elements in a simple way, allowing each element to speak for itself. In the kitchen, we left the beautiful Bath stone wall exposed, contrasting it with the smooth concrete on the floor and worktop and the strong graphic lines of the Crittall doors. As much as I love the more contemporary additions, they only work for me when combined with older elements.

“My style is simple and pared back and I knew right from the start what I wanted the house to look like. We brought a lot of furniture with us from London Fields, including a beautiful 18th-century bureau from Josephine Ryan Antiques, which I will take with me wherever I go. We also bought some new pieces and nabbed a few others from my parents, who have a lovely house. I’ve realised that big pieces of furniture really work in relatively small rooms and actually make the rooms feel more spacious.

“The bones of the house are all very neutral, so we mainly chose soft paint colours from Paint and Paper Library’s ‘Stone’ range. They subtly vary between each room, so you get this ever-so-slight change as you move through the house depending on where the light is.”

Michael: “Hannah’s done a brilliant job in getting some colour into our two girls’ rooms. There’s lots of colourful bunting, pretty pictures and papier-mâché animal heads on the walls, which make the rooms quite playful.”

Hannah: “Our bedroom, which is at the front of the house and looks out across the streets, is the most patterned room, with a green foliage wallpaper by Farrow & Ball on the walls. It felt like quite a grand room and this somehow elevates it and brings the outdoors in. The room feels very harmonious and calm.

“My favourite spot in the house is on the sofa in the living room at the front of the house. If you sit at one end of it, you get the most perfect view through the little library/playroom, into the kitchen and down to the garden, with its brick wall that glows pink at the end of the day.”

Michael: “The garden is still a work in progress and we’re hoping to put some raised beds in at the bottom, which we can plant up with herbs and vegetables. We want to get the girls planting and growing, as they’re always quite enthusiastic about digging.

“I’m already looking forward to our next project, but I know for Hannah this has been a real labour of love. Our next project will hopefully be something bigger and it might be outside of Bath. That said, we really love this part of Bath, as it has a village feel with a butcher, baker, greengrocer and pharmacy. It’s very tranquil and we can easily get onto the path that runs along the canal – one way takes you to the centre and the other takes you to fields and forests. I’m not sure we’ll ever find anything as fantastic as this.”

Hannah and Michael, how do you define modern living?

Hannah: “For us, it’s about breathing new life into an existing structure to create a space that is beautiful and functional. It’s all about working sympathetically with the old.”

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

Hannah: “St Margaret’s Steps in Bradford-on-Avon is pretty perfect. The way they’ve treated the building is really sympathetic. You can see the space for what it is and I absolutely love that.”

Michael: “It’s not for sale, but we both loved Gina Portman’s newbuild barn in East Sussex. It’s so sculptural and breathtaking in its sense of space.”