As an owner of a company that designs and builds furniture, Hamish Forbes wasn’t initially daunted by a full renovation of his one bedroom cottage in the west of Scotland. However, he soon realised small doesn’t always mean simple

TEXT NIK HUNTER IMAGES HAMISH FORBES

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. On this project, there were more than a few.

Hamish Forbes bought Rockwell cottage on the edge of the conservation village of Cardross in January 2021. As the founder of a company which specialises in designing and building campervan furniture as well as a newly established firm which designs and builds home furniture – Hamish had a busy schedule, and he kept his plans for the cottage simple.

A ‘CHOCOLATE BOX’ VISION

The one-bedroom property needed some modernisation, but Hamish wasn’t planning anything too significant – a few small renovations and it would be habitable and comfortable. “I was going to live here and tinker with it; it was never intended to be a major project. I wanted to redecorate and create a nice little chocolate box cottage.”

After living in Rockwell for a month, Hamish had other ideas. He comments: “It is an incredibly small property, indeed the footprint of my office at work is bigger than this place! However, I knew there were ways to make the space work much, much better.”

Hamish quite literally started chipping away – and that’s when he discovered the wiring issues, the plumbing problems and he realised he had only one option. “I kept taking things out until internally it looked like it was going to fall down, and I was going to have to put it back together again. I didn’t think there was any point in doing one room at a time because of the scale of the building, so I decided to spend the money, get some labour in and attack it.”

At times the cottage was a hive of activity and then when Hamish was busy at work it would quieten down again. “There was a period of about three months when I wasn’t here at all, and it wasn’t lack of interest; I simply didn’t have time.”

As Hamish was pulling his house to bits, there was also the question of where to stay and fortunately the parents of his partner, Emma Jane, came to the rescue. “There is a summer house in the garden and the previous owner’s mum lived in it at one point. It’s properly habitable with a toilet etc; the invitation to stay with Emma’s parents was preferable and I stayed there for about seven months.”

A RUBBLE DILEMMA

While the ripping out of the cottage interior was the quick part, then came stage two, dealing with the rubble that was rapidly covering the floor. “I wasn’t massively knowledgeable about the knocking down part and bits were falling off even where I wasn’t chipping away! Emma is an architect and she looked at it with her architect hat on and we decided to employ a structural engineer.” 

The structural engineer ensured that everything was sound and also confirmed that Hamish’s idea of constructing a mezzanine sleeping level in the sitting room was feasible. It meant the removal of a beam so that a staircase could be fitted but it would give the cottage much-needed extra space. “I was in a mild panic when the engineer visited but he didn’t bat an eyelid about what we had done or planned to do.”

With the sitting room ceiling removed and the beams exposed the project started to gather real momentum. “I started to get excited. The cottage had always felt really small – it was cosy but it was super small. When we removed the ceiling, the sitting room felt huge. Now, when you lie in the mezzanine bed, it feels massive, as you almost have the run of the house.”

INTERIOR INSPIRATION

Inspired by the results in the sitting room, Hamish continued into the kitchen and utility room removing the ceilings and exposing the original beams. The former kitchen was a hotchpotch of different units and cupboards with a cooker in the corner. Hamish decided to move the new range cooker to the side wall and maximise the use of the utility room, adding a return under the window to incorporate another two cupboards and moving the dishwasher and washing machine into this room as well. 

Initially, Hamish had intended to design and build the kitchen himself using his trusty CNC machine on which he designs and creates his interiors and furniture for campervans. However, work commitments didn’t allow it. He did manage to carve out time to make all the splashbacks, which were colour matched with the kitchen units from Wren. He also made a purpose-built storage and drying rack, storage cupboards and a wine rack for the utility room and a seating/dining area in the kitchen. The bench seating stores fold up chairs and the table folds down from the wall as and when required.   

“It was good taking the interior back to nothing because then you can create what you want where you want. When I bought the house, the sitting room was full of furniture and felt really cramped. When Emma and I discovered the original fireplace and hearth it was like we’d struck gold. Not only did it make the room feel bigger it inspired how I wanted the rest of the cottage to look – rustic but modern.”

To tie in with this style, Hamish decided not to plaster over all the stone he’d uncovered but to create a two-tone effect taking a straight line of plaster across the wall. “It’s a clean and crisp effect but decisions like that took a long time. I didn’t envisage spending a week deciding how to plaster a wall. Where on the wall to start, and how high up?”

The ‘feature wall’ is not the only talking point in the room. The piece de resistance is Hamish’s birch ply staircase which accesses the mezzanine level. Practical but also a work of art, it incorporates a table and shelf as part of the foot treads. Cutouts have been made in the steps so there’s contact when your feet are passing through. “The dog bone jigsaw joints were a relatively new experiment as I’d never used them on a load bearing piece. Sometimes I’ll make sure the grain pattern in the jigsaw joint goes a different way, so it stands out rather than blends in. It becomes a feature and then you can carry that feature on.” 

Details are important to this couple, and another room that took extensive time to plan was the generously proportioned bathroom. “I think the bathroom was originally a second bedroom as when the house was built the toilet would likely have been outside. Again, I took everything back to the stone so it could be rewired and replumbed and again a lot of the wall fell off.”

In the bathroom, Emma took charge and panelling was the way she wanted to go. “The idea for the panelling came from @mytinyestate who I follow on Instagram,” she recalls. “They posted about making wood panelling from MDF and I asked Hamish if he could do it on the CNC machine. He went a stage better and by using birch ply he created panelling with a grain through it.”

Hamish continues, “with the CNC machine you can measure out and plan where your grooves are. I think I made the bathroom panels in about 15 minutes. Emma likes to joke that she comes up with ideas and then asks me to ‘print them out’!”

The process for the panels may have been quick but other decisions took time – especially the colour scheme as Emma explains, “I think we spent about a month photoshopping the colour for the bathroom panelling. It matches the kitchen units.”

A QUESTION OF COLOUR

Aware that they were dealing with such a restricted footprint, the couple decided that there would be a neutral backdrop throughout but with a statement colour in each room that would flow into the next. Three different
shades of white were chosen, one for the floor, one for the woodwork and one for the walls and the statement colour which ended up being orange/mustard appears to have come from Hamish’s wardrobe. “I have a lot of
orange t-shirts, which might be where the idea stems from! My wardrobe may be questionable, however in my defence, I think that orange and mustard is a good colour to match with the natural birch as the grain of the birch is a yellowy grain.”

It certainly packs a punch, and no more so than in the bathroom with tiles that Emma was adamant had to match with everything else in the house. The reeded shower screen was something else on her wish list and also took a while to source. “It was another Instagram find and I eventually found it at Victorian Plumbing. Our plumber also gave us a great tip on where to position the tap for the shower. Fit it on the adjacent wall and you don’t have to reach into the shower and get wet when you turn it on.”

Finishing touches come in the form of a vanity unit which Hamish designed and is perfectly centred on the wall. “It’s the wonder of the CNC machine, I can make anything to fit. If I want to design something to the width of 283.5 cm, it’s no problem.” To complement his handiwork, Emma sourced a striking black and white sink from Tiki Moon.

Although in the bathroom the couple had an abundance of space, the main bedroom was a tight squeeze. “It was a head scratcher; it’s a small room with not a lot of options and obviously you have to fit a bed in. I didn’t know how to lay it out and make it look good at the same time.”

Fortunately, Hamish says he was ready to listen to Emma’s advice. She advised building bedside tables into the wood panelling which would double up as a headboard. She also suggested changing the cables for the bedside lamps to black and shortening the cables so nothing was dangling on the floor, all of which created the illusion of more floor space.

However, there was one thing that Emma was keen to do, and Hamish was not and that was to add the reveals at the side of the panelling around the bed. “I actually asked the Tiny Estate Guys whether or not to do the reveals and they replied a hundred per cent do it,” says Emma. “She was right!” Hamish adds.

ON REFLECTION

It’s taken about a year to put the cottage back together and Hamish admits that he and Emma have been very fortunate. “We think about what we’d like and most of the time we can make it, it’s quite a nice skill to have. There was no pressure to finish the renovations as we were living with Emma’s parents and that allowed us to spend a month photoshopping the bathroom which is a luxury.”

However, now the cottage is finished, was it really worth taking it apart to build it back up again? Hamish says that stripping it to the bone was the right approach: “I think if you don’t take it all the way back there’s always something you don’t know about. We know everything about this house, and I think if it had carried on the way it was, it might not have lasted that long. I think we’ve given it a new life.”