Design polymath Patrick Williams' triumphantly restored house and shop in Bath

Making a cup of tea is not just a case of flicking on the kettle in this Georgian house in Bath: it involves boiling a pan of water and pouring it into a little tea-pot. ‘It’s about time I designed a nice, good-looking kettle,’ jokes the designer Patrick Williams, who restores and reinvents historic buildings through his practice, Berdoulat. He and his wife, Neri, have also spent the past four years creating a collection of handsome furniture and accessories. So it is a plausible idea. And, as those who have seen their previous homes (featured in House & Garden’s November 2012 Green By Design supplement and in the January 2017 issue) will know, this belief in doing things right underpins their whole approach to life. Patrick is, after all, a man who decants washing-up liquid into old glass bottles.

The couple met 11 years ago over a deli counter in Herne Hill, in south London, and quickly realised they shared an appreciation for the simpler things in life. Neri was working at the deli while studying for a master’s in photography at London College of Communication; Patrick had launched Berdoulat four years earlier. ‘We both had a respect for the soul of things and anything crafted by hand,’ explains Neri, who moved to England in her twenties from Istanbul.

Patrick grew up appreciating patina and history, spending every school holiday at Berdoulat’s namesake, his parents’ renovated 18th-century farmhouse in south-west France, where he would wake to the sound of his father’s cement mixer. ‘Dad taught me to appreciate the details in a building,’ says Patrick, who went on to study fine art at the University of Oxford, before landing a job in a digital marketing agency in London. His evenings, however, were spent ripping down false ceilings in his first flat in Brixton and, in 2006, he decided to make his pastime a job and founded Berdoulat. ‘I’m not remotely qualified to be an interior designer,’ says Patrick. ‘But I do have an innate sense of what is right for a building.’

A lot has happened in the intervening years. Patrick and Neri have had two little girls, Wren, now eight, and Bonnie, six, which prompted them to swap London for Bath in 2013. Their first home in the city was a Georgian townhouse in Pierrepont Place, which Patrick sensitively restored to create their family home and was also a B&B. Neri, a good cook, was renowned for her delicious Turkish breakfasts and the Berdoulat B&B became a manifestation of their shared approach to design.

MAY WE SUGGEST: A dream eighteenth-century house in Bath restored by designer Patrick Williams

By 2016, they had started to think about a new project. ‘People used to come into our kitchen for breakfast and would want to buy the cupboard, the table and the plates,’ recalls Neri. ‘We thought about selling antiques,’ continues Patrick. ‘But then Neri suggested that it might be more fulfilling to design our own pieces and have them made by local craftspeople.’ And so they set to work, designing a range of kitchen furniture and tabletop pieces, and finding makers who could realise their vision.

The idea gained momentum when Neri spotted that a former antique shop with living quarters in Bath had just come on the market. Nestled between the Royal Crescent and The Circus, it forms part of a charming Georgian street called Margaret’s Buildings. There were many glitches – not least that it was being sold with the neighbouring building, which made it prohibitively expensive. After a bit of back and forth, the vendors agreed to sell it on its own. ‘We made an offer there and then,’ recalls Patrick. ‘We didn’t even get a survey, because it quite obviously needed a ton of work – there was wet rot, asbestos, you name it.’

The Grade II-listed space actually consists of three buildings: the shop, built in 1768 and retaining its 1890 front, fittings, signage and a first-floor gallery; a mews house at the rear, which started out life as The Rising Sun pub in 1800; and a middle building from 1840 that was probably used for stabling. In around 1890, the buildings were joined together.

For three months, the family had to camp out in a bedroom above the shop while they worked on getting the space ready to rent out – first to the historic wall- paper specialist Allyson McDermott and then to the design gallery 8 Holland Street.

As with all of his projects, Patrick stuck to his motto that ‘the building is the client and should dictate what’s done to it’, scrutinising every architrave and cornice. ‘We wanted everything to be just as it should be,’ says Patrick, who submitted an 180-page Heritage Statement along with their planning application and went to extreme lengths to retain every detail. He even preserved the origi- nal mahogany door between the shop and what is now their home in the middle section, cleverly converting it into the required fire door. The rear mews house, beauti-fully renovated by Patrick and currently rented out, will soon become Berdoulat’s design studio.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Characterful furniture and clever combinations of colour in an 18th-century house in Bath

Sandwiched between the mews house and shop, their home has seen the greatest architectural changes. The footprint of the infill was reduced to create an internal courtyard, reinstating one that would have been there before 1890, and bringing light into the sitting room and kitchen. So too does the addition of a first-floor skylight in what is now an impressive double-height kitchen area, with a galleried room above it. This new space, lined with books and known as Rosie’s Room in memory of Patrick’s mother who passed away during the renovations, is won-derfully light-filled and provides access to Patrick and Neri’s bedroom above the shop. At the other end of it, Wren and Bonnie’s atmospheric, circus-themed bedroom looks out through what would originally have been external windows into the kitchen below.

In the kitchen are several Berdoulat designs, including a ‘Vaisselle Dresser’ and ‘Crescent Refectory Table’, both available to buy in the shop. ‘We design pieces that are functional, but are also aesthetically pleasing,’ says Neri. At first, Patrick wanted the larger pieces of furniture to have a certain degree of patina, but he has now embraced new oak and douglas fir for what they are: ‘We see them as heirloom pieces. While they perhaps look fresh when you buy them, they’ll have had 50 years of wear and tear when they’re passed on to the next generation.’