When a couple needed to live on site at their Somerset events venue, a disused cattle shed became an unlikely – and highly personal – family home. By Jessica Jonzen
SCAFFOLD-BOARD SARKING BOARDS ADD WARMTH AND TEXTURE TO THE PITCHED ROOF IN THE OPEN-PLAN KITCHEN. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
The best homes are the ones that seem to mould themselves around the lives of their owners. Tom and Pippa Godberford Moore’s converted barn in Somerset is one of them. It is a house shaped by the things they love and the work they do, by the way they cook and entertain, their preference for natural materials and, in Tom’s case, a rather serious enthusiasm for wild swimming. Its character comes not from an imagined country-house ideal, but from the life that takes place within it.
Which makes its origins all the more surprising. The house began life as a disused L-shaped cattle shed on Pippa’s family farm – Pennard Hill Farm – near Glastonbury, used for storing tents and equipment and, at one end, little more than a compacted dung floor. Yet the building had plenty in its favour: a distinctive shape, good orientation and the potential to become somewhere private and separate from the increasingly busy life of the farm.
Over the years, the farm has evolved far beyond a traditional agricultural holding. “When Pip and I met, we were both working in fairly similar fields. I was running an events business in Exmoor and Pip was also working in events. It made sense for us to put something together business-wise that would support us both. I sold up there and moved over to the farm and we started developing a few barns for commercial use – for weddings, Glastonbury Festival and so on – and investing in the business.”
As the business grew, the old cattle barn began to look like an increasingly sensible place to make a home. “We’d originally started looking at houses in the area,” says Tom. “But I’d lived on site with my last business, which was also on a farm, and it made a lot of sense to be there. Pippa wasn’t very keen because she quite liked being able to close the door and get away from it. But as the business was evolving and growing, it became very obvious that we needed to be on site.”
The barn’s orientation offered the privacy they needed. Its north elevation, towards the working side of the property, could be almost entirely enclosed in stone, without windows, skylights or doors. To the south, the house could open up generously onto a garden, veranda and the old cattle drinking pond.
“As much as we love having guests on the farm, it’s very important for us to have somewhere where we can close the gate and be totally private,” says Tom.
THE WILD-SWIMMING POND IS ACCESSED DIRECTLY FROM TOM AND PIPPA’S BEDROOM AND WAS MADE FROM THE ORIGINAL CATTLE DRINK POND. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
The brief was equally specific. The house needed to accommodate cooking, entertaining and gardening, make the most of life outdoors and use natural materials wherever possible. It also needed to indulge one rather more unusual requirement: allowing Tom to step from the bedroom onto a pontoon and straight into a natural swimming pond.
Tom had converted a similar barn before, so he knew that a long, narrow building could be difficult to get right. Rather than beginning with an architect’s drawings, he spent time in the old cattle shed at different times of day and throughout the year, watching where the light fell and imagining how the spaces might work.
“Pip and I knew how we wanted to live in it, and that might not necessarily be how somebody else would live in it,” he says. Tom drew the first plans himself, roughly to scale, in a notebook. “I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew how we were going to live in it,” he says. Remarkably, those original plans barely changed during the two-year build.
By then, Tom and Pippa already had a trusted relationship with Geoffrey Carew, founder and managing director of West Country Renovations. His first project for them, in 2022, was the conversion of an open hay barn into their commercial kitchen, restaurant and wedding venue. For the house, Geoffrey brought in architectural technologist Alex Lovegrove to handle the planning application and the more complex technical and engineering aspects of the build.
The division of roles was straightforward. Tom and Pippa had the ideas and a very clear understanding of how they wanted the house to work; Alex dealt with the technical side, while Geoffrey’s role was to work out how to turn those ideas into a building.
“There were obviously elements where Geoffrey would say, ‘Right, we’re going to need an engineer to design this,’” says Tom. “So we used Alex Lovegrove for the load-bearing areas and that sort of thing. Geoffrey was very instrumental in the smaller details too. He’s got a very good eye and very good taste.”
Geoffrey estimates the design input at roughly 75 per cent client, 15 per cent architect and 10 per cent builder – an unusually client-led approach that is evident throughout the house.
A SLIDING WINDOW IN THE KITCHENDISAPPEARS INTO A POCKET WALL CREATING AN EXTRAORDINARY INSIDE/OUT EXPERIENCE. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
The kitchen is perhaps the clearest example. Having spent around a decade working as a private chef, Tom knows exactly what makes a kitchen work – and what happens when it has been designed without anyone who actually cooks in mind.
“I remember cooking in this enormous palazzo in Tuscany and there was probably 50 feet between the sink and the oven, and another 50 feet to the refrigerator, with two enormous marble islands in between them,” he says. “Clearly it had been designed by someone who had never picked up a knife in their life.”
His own kitchen is the antithesis of this: highly practical but designed for people to gather in too. A large banquette provides somewhere for Pippa or guests to sit with a glass of wine and chat while Tom cooks.
The huge sliding kitchen window takes the idea further. Tom wanted a breakfast bar running from inside to outside, with the glazing disappearing completely into pockets in the wall. There are consequently three places to eat: at the island, at the window bar or at the dining table outside.
“It works for different kinds of weather. Even if it’s warm but drizzling, you can sit outside under the veranda while still being part of the kitchen.” In summer, the whole arrangement opens up. “The swallows fly in and out, and it’s rather lovely.”
There are two fireplaces, one for cooking and another for sitting beside, while a reclaimed Aga was another non-negotiable. “It’s always lovely, especially in winter, to have the Aga ticking away. It’s a great comfort in a house. It’s almost company, really.”
THE BANQUETTE SEATING AREA CREATES A COMFORTABLE PLACE TO RELAX BESIDE THE FIRE. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
Tom prefers the softer enamel and character of an older Aga to the polished chrome of newer models. In fact, much of the house follows the same principle: things should be useful, but they should also have character and beauty.
The steel beam above the kitchen opening, for example, has been clad in slices of reclaimed timber so that an essential structural element reads as an old timber beam. The breakfast bar and island are among the few significant timber elements made from new oak; elsewhere, reclaimed materials dominate.
The original structure was retained wherever possible and strengthened to accommodate the new roof. Reclaimed timber was chosen not simply for its appearance but because new wood could not convincingly reproduce the depth of age, worm holes and weathering of the original.
Reclaimed oak for the kitchen and master bathroom cabinets came from French railway goods carriages found on eBay, while other timber was sourced from Glastonbury Reclamation and Winchcombe in Gloucestershire – suppliers Geoffrey describes as an “absolute godsend”.
Original stone was also saved, with new stone sourced locally to match the existing white and blue Lias. Reclaimed Roman clay tiles were used on the new roof, echoing those of the original cattle shed.
Inside, Tom wanted the materials to remain tactile and honest. He was particularly keen on retaining the rafters and using scaffold-board sarking boards rather than concealing everything behind plasterboard, to create a feeling of warmth in the open-plan space. “It’s very important to us for everything to be natural material,” he says. “We try to avoid chemicals, and it’s very grounding to be surrounded by natural materials and have stone or timber under your feet rather than something man-made.”
TOM AND PIPPA’S BEDROOM, OVERLOOKING THE POND. THE PLASTER WALLS WERE CREATED BY HAND. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
Some of the original stone walls remain exposed, while the plaster was deliberately given a rough, hand-worked quality. Rather than trowelling it smooth, Geoffrey instructed the plasterers to throw it onto the walls in lumps and then work it back with sponges. The aim was texture and solidity, without creating a deliberately rustic or “Disneyfied” version of a farmhouse. After a couple of practise runs, they achieved the tactile look Tom was hoping for.
The most audacious feature of the house is also perhaps the most personal. From the master bedroom, Tom can walk straight onto a pontoon and dive into the pond. The pond pre-dated the house, having been dug in the 1800s as a cattle drinking pond and originally around half its current size. Tom, a keen wild swimmer, had already been using it and wanted to be able to swim first thing in the morning.
The pond was enlarged and deepened, with Geoffrey constructing a dam wall to raise the water level. In winter, the water sits around 500mm higher than the bedroom floor, making waterproofing a considerable challenge. The solution was an external tanking system, while the pontoon was engineered to rise and fall with the changing water levels, running on rails rather than rope. “It was a complete first for us, says Geoffrey.
When Tom finally made his first swim from the bedroom at the end of the two-year build, Pippa was in the bath overlooking it. “It was Easter time so not quite as cold as I like it but still absolutely marvellous.” The pond has since become more than somewhere to swim. Moorhens nest in the rushes, ducklings can be seen from the bedroom, fish attract herons, and tawny owls live in the dead oak on the bank.
THE PONTOON FOR THE SWIMMING POND WAS ENGINEERED TO RISE AND FALL WITH THE WATER LEVEL. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
Outside, the long veranda provides shade in summer and another room-like space between house and garden. It also helps prevent the south-facing interiors from becoming too hot.
The couple’s love of the South of France is reflected in the planting Pippa chose, with salvias, lavender, rosemary, sage and wild fennel creating a loose Mediterranean feel. It is perhaps an understandable attempt to conjure Provence while spending the summer at work on a farm in Somerset. “We sit on the loungers on our laptops and pretend we are on holiday,” Tom says.
Tom and Pippa married during the build, and the finished house feels like a particularly intimate portrait of the life they have chosen to make together. It is a house that works because it was never designed around a fantasy of how they would live, but the reality. It is bold and original while still honouring the architecture and place of the building itself. From the reclaimed Aga to the kitchen window, the veranda to the wild-swimming pond, every decision has been made in response to the people who live there. And that is precisely what makes it so extraordinary.
THE VERANDA CREATES AN INVITING DINING AREA FOR MOST OF THE YEAR, AND HELPS TO SHADE THE KITCHEN IN THE SUMMER MONTHS. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
THE TWO-SIDED OPEN FIREPLACE CREATES A FOCAL POINT IN BOTH THE SITTING ROOM AND KITCHEN. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
THE ROLL TOP BATH ENJOYS A PERFECT VIEW ACROSS THE SWIMMING POND. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
PIPPA AND TOM GODBERFORD MOORE
RECLAIMED CLAY ROOF TILES WERE USED TO MATCH THE ORIGINAL TO MAINTAIN THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE BUILDING. IMAGE: MIKEY REED
westcountryrenovations.com; pennardhillfarm.co.uk
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