COMMENT | WORKING WITH LISTED BUILDINGS | WORDS BY JOHN LAW
In a city where almost every front door opens onto heritage, our inside-and-out design studio has made a speciality of bringing Georgian buildings gently into the present.
There are few places in Britain where the past presses quite so closely on everyday life as Bath. Its honey-coloured terraces, crescents and squares make up a World Heritage city, and behind many of those Palladian façades lie homes protected by listing, some at Grade I, the highest level there is. For owners, that status is both a privilege and a puzzle. How do you make a house built for the eighteenth century work for twenty-first-century life without losing what made it special?
For Woodhouse & Law, answering that question has become something of a calling. We have been lucky enough to have gained a wealth of experience across Grade I and II listed buildings since our launch in 2009. Our starting point is always the building itself. Listed status brings constraints: conversations with conservation officers, careful choices about what can change and what must stay. But it also means the original features are still there to work with. The cornicing, the shutters, the proportions of rooms originally designed for candlelight and conversation.
Rather than fighting the architecture, our studio sets out to celebrate it, letting period detail set the tone and introducing modern comfort where it will sit quietly alongside. That philosophy is visible across the city. On Queen Square, John Wood the Elder’s first great set piece, completed in the 1730s, the studio designed the interiors, bespoke kitchen and bar cabinetry for No. 12, a townhouse restored by APS Homes after almost two centuries as solicitors’ offices. Up on Lansdown Crescent, the team designed, planted and landscaped the gardens of a Grade I-listed townhouse, with terraces, walling and paving that frame some of the finest views in Bath.
The highest-profile commission came in 2023, when the Royal Crescent Hotel & Spa appointed Woodhouse & Law to reimagine its guest rooms, drawing room and lobby. Working within one of the most celebrated terraces in Europe, the team looked outwards for inspiration, to the hotel’s surprisingly verdant hidden gardens, and used them to tie the lobby to the reception rooms and the newly refreshed bar and restaurant. IKSEL’s Italian Promenade fresco design became a centrepiece, bringing landscape indoors.
This is where our dual expertise comes into its own. In a listed building, the line between inside and out is rarely simple: views, light and the relationship between house and garden were all part of what the original architects intended. With patience, respect and a clear eye, these extraordinary buildings can feel every bit as comfortable as they are beautiful, and ready for their next 250 years.
