Back to school

Above: Reception room

Above: The beautiful Greystones in Gloucestershire

Above: The kitchen

Marilyn Gough is quite used to unexpected visitors turning up on her doorstep asking if they might look around her home.

For Greystones in Gloucestershire was built as a Victorian school in the 1850s and closed down only 40 years ago.
“So middle-aged former pupils quite often come back to see their first school,” says Marilyn. “Of the last two one was from South Africa and the other was a Jehovah’s Witness. I’m afraid it’s all quite different now. Where the infants’ classroom was is now our kitchen. And the junior section is our main living area.”

Marilyn and Wolf Gough bought the old school four years ago for themselves and their terriers Basil and Joshua.

“I loved it as soon as I walked in,” says Marilyn an artist who helps her husband in their businesses. “The main room feels as if you are walking into a church because of the space and the double height ceiling which is open to the roof.”

The school closed in about 1965 and was sold off by the Church Commission to an elderly man who stayed there for nearly 40 years before selling it on to a builder.

“There were some old buildings at the back of the school and five years ago the builder demolished them and created a new building comprising of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a utility room on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the top,” says Marilyn. “ He also installed a new kitchen but kept a lot of the period features such as the wonderful arched roof beams, a fireplace, the oak staircase and the stained glass in two of the doors. He even put in some authentic-looking stone window sills to match those in the school room.”

However Marilyn did not like the ‘germolene-pink’ he had painted the living room walls or the black gloss paint he had applied to the beams.

She did not like the brown units in the kitchen either or the unattractive concrete flooring in the extension and she especially did not like the garage at the front of the school which was too big for one car and too small for two.

“So we demolished the garage and created a shingle-covered parking-space which takes six vehicles,” she says. “We knocked the two bedrooms upstairs into one big room and put in fitted wardrobes. I had the brown kitchen units painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Lime White’ and changed the kitchen floor from hideous little concrete tiles to ones of ceramic.

“Then I painted the kitchen walls in bone white and in the upstairs bathroom painted the walls a more soothing cream instead of the very dirty yellow the builder had chosen.”

She also changed the concrete tiles in the extension to ones of ceramic tiles and most importantly had the enormous living room walls and roof beams repainted in the same shade of cream. She even had the huge black chandeliers lowered so they could be repainted brown for a softer look.

They made the plain front door more attractive by adding huge country hinges and an ornamental knocker and changed the green-painted exterior, including the barge boards to a softer shade of Blue Green. They also completely redesigned the gardens, creating walls, steps and terraces and tall plants to shield it from the road.

“The house was surrounded by just a lot of grass before,” says Marilyn. “Amazingly when we demolished the garage we found lots of Cotswold stone in the ground that we could use for building the garden walls. We bought the plants and then had a firm called Copper Leaf to do the planting. Now we’ve designed it so something is growing in it any time of the year.”

The couple also brought a Victorian gate with them from their previous house and had some wrought iron railings made by a local blacksmith to line the steps.

“I also found some unusual trellis work which is shaped just like our Gothic windows,” says Marilyn. “Now we grow orange climbing roses and clematis up it.”

The couple have installed oil-fired central heating and put wood-burners in the fireplaces.

However the Goughs have now decided to move to sunnier climes and have sold their home through Savills of Cirencester.

Does your home have a photogenic interior? If so and you would like to appear in Cotswold Life please contact Victoria on victoria@vjenkins.co.uk. Contemporary styles are particularly popular at the moment.