A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Treasures from around the globe fill this newly extended, reconfigured and revived Victorian house in Perthshire

- Miriam Methuen-Jones

How many people can say that both William Wallace and Robert the Bruce fought in their back yard? The owners of this slice of Perthshire paradise have bragging rights aplenty, and a dash of history is just the start of it. Those Scottish heroes were caught up in skirmishes against the Auld Enemy some seven centuries ago in the adjoining Methven Wood, just a stone's throw from where the seven-bedroom house now stands.

“It's a stone building, dating from around 1840,” says Stephen Wilson of Lorn Macneal Architects, the practice charged with revitalising the house. “A large extension was added to the south in 1907, and it has had various other alterations over the years. It has always been a private house, though, with large grounds, including a lovely walled garden. There's an abandoned reservoir too, and an outbuilding that was used as a barracks during the Second World War. You'd expect a house like this to be listed, but strangely enough it isn't; nevertheless, it was rightly treated as a listed building when we applied for planning permission."

Stephen and his colleagues at Lorn Macneal quickly got to grips with the house's problem areas. “There were a lot of separate, cellular spaces and there was no natural progression through the interior. We altered the layout quite significantly and added a garden room extension to connect the house to the grounds."

The new owners wanted to retire to Perthshire, so bought the house as their forever home. The couple, who are originally from Australia and Fife, had been based in Hong Kong for decades; they moved everything across and sold a property they had in Scone, so had two homes' worth of furniture to fit into this one.