Anne and Peter Hughes’ mirror-clad home is a light and spacious escape from city life

WORDS KIRSTY DOOLAN PHOTOS ADELINA ILIEV

From the front of the house, passers-by have no idea of the mirrored extension at the back

When Anne and Peter Hughes stumbled upon their new home it looked absolutely nothing like it had done in their dreams. But with hard work, tenacity and endless amounts of patience, they’ve managed to transform it into something spectacular. “We were living in a small, two-bedroom flat in south east London with our young son and had neighbours from hell upstairs; we desperately needed more space,” says Anne. “We’d been house-hunting for months but couldn’t find anything bigger in our price range, so it was a long old haul of feeling very frustrated and stuck where we were.”

The couple had almost given up hope when Anne was flicking through a property magazine while at the local leisure centre and stumbled across a listing advertising exactly what they were looking for. She was pleasantly surprised to see an aff ordable property for sale in a beautiful private estate in Blackheath, so she immediately called the estate agent. “It turned out the building was in the process of being sold, but the sale had fallen through,” explains Anne. “It was a 1950s bungalow that had plenty of potential, but was in a conservation area next to a listed building, so gaining planning permission to change it was going to be tricky. When we purchased it in 2005 it was by far the worst house on the best street, but we didn’t mind as we knew we could really make it our own.”

The ground floor of the house is on two levels and connected by steps; the raised area is the couple’s favourite space in their revamped home

Rooflights were incorporated into the ground floor to let plenty of daylight flow throughout

But this good luck didn’t last long, as the planning process proved to be incredibly difficult. The couple wanted to convert the attic of the bungalow into bedrooms, but ended up living there for five years before they were able to make any changes. “Getting formal permission for the alterations was much harder than we had expected,” says Anne. “The local council wasn’t the main problem, but the neighbours and local associations made the process very challenging and upsetting. They seemed to think we just wanted to develop the land and then sell up and leave, but we tried to explain we wanted it as a long-term family home.”