The owners of an unusual property in East Devon are used to being asked some strange questions about their home, a converted reservoir on the outskirts of Sidmouth. Does it flood? Chrissy Harris goes into the underground ‘burrow’ to find out.
‘Don’t you get flooded?’ is what lots of people ask Mark Laurenti since he and wife Caroline bought their home in Sidmouth four years ago.
The couple have accepted that the question goes with the territory when you live in a converted reservoir in a hillside on the outskirts of Sidmouth.
‘See that metal plate out there?’ says Mark. ‘That’s the top of a pretty complicated drainage system. Water gathers on the floor, a bit like on a patio, and then a series of channels have been cut into a sort of Union Jack shape and tilted. The water just runs through.’
With that pressing issue out of the way, it’s time to find out what it’s really like living in 7,500 square feet of subterranean space.
‘We just came in and fell in love with it straight away,’ says Mark. ‘It was like nothing else we’d ever seen before - and we have owned some lovely properties.’
Mark, recently retired from a career in finance, and Caroline, who works for a local property firm, have spent their married life buying, developing and selling gorgeous houses, including two beautiful places not far from here.
They were quite settled in their previous home in Sidmouth and weren’t planning to move again until their boys, Sam, 23 and Mattie, 21, had finished university. Then they saw this place.
Woolbrook Reservoir, decommissioned in 2003, was converted into a house in 2010 by a civil engineer. The main rooms – many of them double-height – look out over a central atrium, which traps the sunlight. The whole place is sunk below the garden and the artificial turf roof makes the house very much at one with the surrounding countryside.
‘It’s like coming into a secret world,’ says Mark. ‘We just felt like, this was it. We could live here.’
The pull of Woolbrook made the couple decide to sell their perfectly lovely previous home to try a completely different way of living. They moved here in August 2019 and set about transforming the inside.
Mark and Caroline’s new underground dwelling was structurally sound but needed adapting and upgrading inside to bring it up to the next level.
‘We decorated everything, added a new kitchen and bathroom and moved a few walls around, which is actually quite minor for us!’ explains Mark, well used to getting his hands dirty on projects. ‘I’m an office worker but I really do like getting involved,’ he adds. ‘Every place that we’ve had, well, we’ve always hit it hard.’
However, a gentle touch was needed when it came to working out the interiors.
Mark is into his pop art and has long campaigned for a cerise pink kitchen. He also wanted a graffiti artist to create a mural in the ‘tunnel’ entrance hall.
‘Covid stopped that and then Caroline put the brakes on it,’ says Mark. He’s also toned down his kitchen plans to a more sedate blue. ‘I say to my boys, there are some lines you just cannot cross,’ he adds, laughing. ‘I do like to be more way out but it’s a compromise. It has to be, doesn’t it?’
‘It took me a long time to persuade Caroline to have those units over there,’ he says, pointing to the striking, art deco-style side cabinets in the dining area. ‘And the wall up there with the seascapes… I’m not totally against it but I’d have pop art up there any day.’
We agree that a happy medium works well in here. With such a big space to fill, it would be tempting to go all-out because the huge rooms can take it. But a few eye-catching pieces softened with soft furnishings makes Woolbrook feel like home, rather than a gallery. A passion for plants also helps. Mark’s impressive collection of cacti and succulents are thriving in the heat and the light that comes through the floor-to-ceiling glass.
‘It was about converting it to our taste and adding what we like,’ says Mark. Has it been an organic process? ‘No, not at all,’ he replies. ‘We’re very much “let’s just get it done”. I think it’s partly because we’ve never stayed in a place that long. If we dragged it out, by the time we put the last piece in, we’d be leaving. We’ve always just banged it out, done it up and then moved.’
Woolbrook has broken the cycle, however. Mark and Caroline are holding onto this place, even though their lives are about to take an exciting turn. The couple are planning to go travelling around the world and are leaving Woolbrook for others to enjoy. When we meet, Mark has just been putting the finishing touches to a brochure about his home for Luxury Coastal, the holiday let firm that will be managing Woolbrook while the couple are away.
‘I don’t tend to get attached to houses, but I love this place,’ says Mark. ‘I put heart and soul into everywhere we live but there’s usually a reason to sell it in the end, but not this time. It’s so lovely, so nice to live in.’
The fact that Mark’s draft brochure about his house is 57-pages long gives some indication about the connection he has to his ‘Teletubbies house’, as he calls it (a reference to the classic children’s television series where brightly coloured characters live in a dome built into the earth).
‘That’s a coincidence in itself,’ adds Mark. ‘Caroline used to work as a toy buyer for Woolworths and Mothercare. She helped to introduce Teletubbies to the UK, so we’ve gone full circle!’
Woolbrook definitely has a sense of childhood fun about it.
‘We want people to enjoy it as much as we do,” says Mark. ‘I’m glad we’re able to share it.’
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