This beautiful Staffordshire home belongs to travel journalist Tristan, textile artist Kathryn, and their three children. Last year, we transformed their 1920s three-bedroom bungalow with a ground-floor wraparound and loft extension, creating a modern and significantly more spacious three-bedroom house.

Want to see more of Kathryn & Tristan? Give their episode of Change of Plans a watch.

Kathryn: I am American-Italian, so I grew up between those two countries. I was living in France when I met Tristan, and we both worked as travel journalists for many years. Over the past few years, I've changed my job and retrained as a textile artist, so I work on a traditional, old-fashioned loom. I spend my time between Lichfield and London; I have a studio in each place. And Tristan and I have three young children, twins who are nine years old and a six year old.

Tristan: I'm a travel journalist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. I'm originally from Lichfield; I moved to the south of France with work when I was 25 and I met Kathryn there, and then, when we started to have young children around, it just made sense to be somewhere a little bit quieter and closer to my parents.

Tristan: We moved back here to Lichfield from the south of France, where we used to live and work. And what came on the market for about a year was total dross; we knew we'd have to take matters into our own hands. I read the autobiography of Alan Sugar, and he wanted to live in a very specific area of Essex. So he wrote a letter to all these houses that he liked, saying he had a young family and that he had always admired their house. And from those letters he sent, he got three back. He went to see them and bought one of them! So we channelled Lord Sugar and wrote about 25 letters to the houses in the area that we really liked and could afford, and about five of them got back to us. We were super lucky because the owners of this house were the last to write back. They said, 'Come over, but we need to deal with it quickly'. I jumped on my bike and was over in about seven minutes from closing my laptop at work. Six weeks later, it was ours! It was really lucky, but sometimes you've got to make your own luck. I think the family really liked the fact that we reached out to them on a personal level.

Tristan: It was a perfect place for us. It was a little box house with a south-facing garden that wasn't overlooked, with views of Lichfield Cathedral. But the house needed a lot of work. When we took up the carpets, we found a Daily Mail article about Princess Margaret from the 1950s! We'd open a door, and the doorknob would come off in our hands, and a radiator nearly fell off the wall. So we knew when moving in that it would need a lot of work. We bought a house with a south facing garden, but it was so dark inside, and the house had no conversation with the garden.

Kathryn: First, we found a local architect. And even though they came over, they struggled with getting the measurements and it didn't quite feel like the house we wanted. So we sat on the plans for a while, and then we found Resi online, which was just perfect for us. We loved that you were based in London, but you didn't need to be here in person. Our Resi designer was able to take the architectural drawings and just make a few tweaks that took it to the next level, and the design really made the house that little bit more special.

Tristan: We really hoped to start the project in March 2020, but obviously things had to be delayed. Our work was really up and down. As travel journalists, we were used to traveling the world - China one month, New York the next, then the Middle East. All that stopped for two years, so we had some financial issues with taking on this huge project. We eventually started in 2022 after refining the designs with Resi.

Kathryn: We wanted to do it as quickly as we could, but we just had to go with what the world was like at the time, and also what our budget dictated.

Tristan: I think the hardest thing about any renovation is that you only do it once in your life, maybe twice. So you have to learn everything from the start, about structural engineering, pipe work, building codes, and you have to place your trust and your life savings in a builder that probably only has time to meet you twice, and an architect that you might not meet, and that's a huge thing of trust. We had to get the right architect and the right builder to coincide, and it took a year or two for the builder we chose to be free.

Tristan: I think what a lot of people find during a renovation is that you run out of patience and money, despite the best-laid plans. For example, we had to recycle our old staircase as a five-meter-long shelf. The scaffold boards that we used to build the house have become shelves as well. And we really wanted a polished concrete floor, but we couldn't afford it. So we did a self level that we've painted with a special oil. It looks really nice! But those were all things that we had to fit in at the last minute, when our nerves and our budget were fraying. We had to get creative.

Tristan: One of the best, and least expensive, features we did was our rainbow-of-green staircase. The staircase only cost £1,200! An old boy made it for us locally, and we involved Farrow & Ball to help us with the design. They sent their colour consultant over who helped us to pick the eleven shades of green.

Kathryn: One of my favourite ideas from Resi was my studio. We used to have an old galley kitchen, and above it was a sloped roof. And Resi had the idea of just popping the roof up and creating a mezzanine, and the mezzanine is now my studio! It's not very big, but it's the perfect space for me. It fits my loom, and it gets wonderful light through the skylight above it. It's an optimisation of space that we never would have thought of. So that’s one of my favourite things that has completely changed my life.

Tristan: We use the house as a real playhouse. We have three kids under the age of 10, so we knew that for at least the next decade we'll be doing homework together, eating together, cooking together, playing together. We probably could have added more bedrooms, but we chose to turn a three bedroom house into a three bedroom house with our life savings so that we can have this huge living space. We play table tennis on this table, marbles on the floor, racing radio controlled cars. The climbing wall will really take it to another level.

Kathryn: And there's a little nook that's underneath the stairs so our kids can be with us, but they can also be separate. Sometimes our kids need that time to get away from everyone, but they still want to be part of the group. We're all on the autism spectrum, so all five of us need time to put on our noise-cancelling headphones and read. There are plenty of spaces and little nooks built into the house where you can find your own space.

Photography & Videography by Peter Furlong.