Our Open House series offers you a chance to meet the sellers of homes we represent to hear what’s made their homes enriching, special places to live. Here, we head to Brockley in south-east London to meet Tamara Giltsoff, who tells us the story of how, along with her husband, Robert Conway, the couple went about transforming their renovated Victorian house into a modern living space that comes with a contemporary extension and landscaped garden. Check out the listing here.

Tamara: “In all honesty, we were definitely not looking for a Victorian house. We really like 1960s townhouses, and we very nearly bought one in Dulwich Woods. This is a good example of Victorian architecture, though. It’s very spacious with a really wide hallway. For me, there’s something about an entrance to a home that’s really important – walking into a squashed, cramped hallway just sets the wrong tone, I think.

“The feeling of space here is what I’ve come to value most about this house. It’s a big house and there’s only two of us in it, and we feel very lucky for that. And I value the light and the space around the house. Even though we’re in London the sky behind us is very big because at the end of the long garden is a railway track (and not a particularly busy one). Because it’s so full of trees, you look out and you could be in the countryside. All of that really came before we did the work.

“I met my husband after returning from living and working in New York. He was living in Holloway in north London at the time and I wasn’t too far away. When we got married we bought this house together.

“I think we feel in love with Brockley as much as the house but we didn’t know anything about the area before we looked here. We don’t have kids, so we wanted to move somewhere that wasn’t too yummy mummy. There are lots of young families here now, actually, but it still has this really nice relaxed, arty, cool-but-not-too-much vibe going on.

“There’s a great community, which under lockdown has just come out even more. I’ve set up a WhatsApp group on the street and now there are 45 people in it, and we’re all swapping and exchanging, using each other’s printers and what else.

“We moved in as soon as we bought it in 2012, lived here for six months and then moved out for six months while we did the work. One of the main parts of the brief was that the house really needed upgrading. And that was everything ­– electrics, plumbing, insulating, new windows – so we had to gut the whole house and start again.

“The objective was to bring the house into the 21st century and to bring in light, especially on the lower ground floor. A lot of the houses on this street have been tampered with a lot, but I’m quite glad we didn’t do anything too radical to the overall structure to achieve what we wanted to, as we wanted to preserve the integrity of the original building.

“We worked with our friend Patrick Bankhead of Southstudio Architects on the whole house but specifically the kitchen extension, which has a big window that lets in a lot of light, and a little bench to sit and watch the garden.

“That little seat in the window is probably the most used in the house: you can sleep there, watch the bees and birds from there, eat breakfast, it’s cosy at night time and light and sunny in the day, and even when it’s pouring down you can still feel like you’re outside. It’s been magic, and something I would replicate in the future. I think it’s so much better than the sliding door thing because how often do we get hot enough weather to have them open?

“About two years after we did the main work, we worked with garden designer Nicola Kelly on a wild garden-inspired scheme. That really was the completion of the extension; without the garden it was only really half the job done.

“We inherited some really beautiful trees: a mulberry at the back, a fig, an evergreen, a twisted hazel, and a bay tree, and then all the trees that surround us. We did a lot of planting, and since I’ve got into gardening, which has had a really big impact on my life.

“I’ve spent a fair amount of time tinkering, planting and growing vegetables, which has been lovely. And it’s designed to have what’s called winter interest, so beyond the summer there’s something beautiful to see and you get really lovely light hitting the trees and the plants.

“For me, modern living is about the space around you, as opposed to any artefacts. I think I’m a strongly aesthetic person, and the way a room feels, the way shapes sit together and light falls, and how you feel in a room defines modernity to me, as opposed to a colour or an object, or a certain style.

“When it comes to interiors, I think I just follow my natural instinct. I drew inspiration from some research, forming ideas over time, and quite a lot was done after the big build, like the carpentry work (all done by our brilliant neighbour and friend, Michael) and the painting, and we bought quite a bit of art since buying the house. That doesn’t all happen overnight, so it’s a gradual process.

“Historically I’ve gone super modern and quite minimalist, but here it’s Victorian, which allows for quite an eclectic mix of different styles. In the living room we have a 1970s style chair and footrest, mixed with a Victoriana sofa, mixed with a much more contemporary coffee table and rug, mixed with a Japanese cabinet – I mean you can’t get much more mixed up than that. I quite enjoy not taking it too seriously now, I suppose, and just being a bit playful about can be mixed together.

“There are nice moments that came about incidentally in the building process. In the upper ground floor bathroom, we’ve got wood panels around the bath, which were taken from the original floorboards in the attic. I have a bit of an obsession with bathrooms in that I don’t like them to look like bathrooms. I didn’t want them to be clinical but rather warm, unusual and eclectic spaces, which I think we’ve managed.

“It’s a tough decision to leave because we do love this house, but for the last five years we’ve been wanting to leave London. We’ve decided we want to sell this and buy something in Somerset, where we have a big group of friends we are very close with.”