After meandering down Little M’s luscious green lane, you’ll suddenly stumble upon Round n Round at the beginning of our woodland. She is nestled in amongst the sycamore trees (better known as Cornish Maple in these parts 😁) and looks like she’s been here forever… the only give away is the golden colour of the local Larch cladding that is yet to turn its final seasoned grey.
Round n Round is a magical hand built double circular cabin. Hand built by us, in collaboration with Jimmy, a local craftsman. He was able to build the whole structure offsite in component parts – a bit like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle – according to our design spec, and then together we all assembled her on site. Each panel is made in boxed sections filled with sheep’s wool and they all clipped together… like a glove! Genius! It was very satisfying. The trickiest part for Jimmy was working out how to create the joining link corridor and make her watertight.
The interior itself grew organically as the build progressed. We knew we needed height to put the bed on some kind of platform which – along with wanting two roundhouses – had challenged Jimmy’s ‘out of the box design’… But now we had it, we weren’t clear how we were going to achieve this. It was only when we were working out what rounds of wood (branches) we had put aside ‘in case they came in useful for the furniture’, that we thought about using ‘tree trunks’ for the legs of the mezzanine platform… and only after all the bark was removed and we started thinking about where to cut them and how we might bolt them together, that we thought we might be able to use the crux of the branches to hold all the cross posts up…
Once the idea was formed, it took quite some time and lots of head scratching to calculate angles, lengths and figure out exactly how we were going to realise it – the branches individually were pretty heavy, so we were glad Jimmy was still onsite working on the windows and able to lend a hand.
We got there in the end, and are pretty chuffed with how well it worked. So well, in fact, as the branches give the illusion that they are coming up through the floor and out through the ceiling… from there the theme grew… balustrades of branches, kitchen cabinets with branches, door hooks and curtain poles… but what about the stairs?
We’d talked about a spiral staircase during the design phase, but it was hard to visualise the physical space then and whether we could make it work with the sloping ceiling… We’d looked at lots of ways of building one, but again, the wood was massive and too heavy for the two of us to move as a whole. We had to think harder and smarter if we were to have a tree trunk staircase…
Then like a lightening bolt or maybe a fairy wand, it came to us… but you’ll have to come and visit, see for yourself and wonder how… but it is there. It’s solid and curvy and central to the room… inviting you up, up, up…
… you’ll not want to leave the luxury of the kingsize bed, set under a metre wide dome light… you’ll be too busy watching the stars or the dancing branches of the trees outside depending on the time of day/year. Hypnotic and dreamy, immersing yourself in the view above… unwind… relax… renew…
From here we carried on, all other concepts seemed easy by comparison, do able, everything from the copper walled shower room to the curved kitchen cabinets… the curved deck to the curved toilet and sink pedestal…
We chose another lovely leather Chesterfield to sit under the mezzanine in front of the cosy wood burner, and again went wacky with Upcycle lighting. Our friendly electrician checked they were all safe and loved our originality, as we’re sure you will…
