skinflint Founders Chris and Sophie Miller's Beautiful Cornish Home
When Chris and Sophie Miller, co-founders of restored vintage lighting company skinflint, bought their traditional Cornish cottage in 2012 they embarked on a renovation project to bring it up to 21st-Century environmental and sustainable standards, simultaneously looking to retain its character whilst making it their own. As you would expect, their home is a treasure trove of reclaimed and restored finds. Here Sophie explains how they have created their low-impact and creative family home:
Tell me about your home...
When we first started our business a decade ago we were restoring our vintage lights in the kitchen of our tiny town flat in Falmouth. So we immediately fell in love with the space and location of our cottage in rural South West Cornwall, and the size of the garden - we have just over an acre of land and grow a lot of our own produce. We also wanted the challenge of repurposing a traditional cottage and transforming it into a contemporary family living and working space. Renovating a home takes time (and financial investment!), especially when you are juggling a growing business and family, so we are going slow. Eventually the business outgrew the cottage and this side of the business is now based in a converted Victorian warehouse on the Penryn wharfside, although we often still work from home and enjoy the flexibility of the space.
What is your and Chris’s vision for your home?
Our first steps were to make it as environmentally friendly as possible as it’s really important to us as a family to try and live a low-impact life. Many of our initial steps aren’t visible: insulating the loft, installing solar panels and removing the obsolete oil-fired central heating system and aga (agas are lovely but running an oil fired engine in the kitchen all year just didn’t sit with our environmental ethos). We replaced it all with a very clever pellet boiler system - we have a hopper in the garden which is filled annually with eco-wood pellets.
Image Credit https://arnoldskitchens.co.uk/
How does your home work for you and your family?
Our family style is eclectic and personal. Chris is a minimalist, I’m probably what would be described as a maximalist, and our children also have their own interior opinions which we are happy to accommodate. As a result, our home is a melting pot of creativity. The kitchen, in particular, reflects this. It’s a workspace - we all cook a lot - and it’s the heart of the home. You enter the house through our big french windows stepping directly into this space so you are straight into the hub of where everything happens. The colours and tones in the kitchen are linked to the outdoors, one wall is basically garden so it was important that the rest of the room reflected the garden and almost felt like part of it. We also have a quiet study space for when we need to work from home.
Where do you find your inspiration for decorating?
Visually our home is very much linked to the garden outside through our large windows and house plants. We were inspired by the concepts behind Margaret and Charles Rennie-Mackintosh’s rebuilt home in Glasgow where the darker more earthy spaces are on the ground floor, growing up to lighter more airy spaces above. This is reflected in the reclaimed Iroko wood floor we have laid throughout the downstairs areas and the earthy tones of the concrete, copper and zinc in the kitchen. It’s a simple but effective framework for creating your design. We also love incorporating our favourite vintage reclaimed finds within the space, and our vintage lights wherever possible!
Tell us more about how you mix and match new features with reclaimed and vintage elements…
Buying new isn’t bad, but we have always tried to live with the principle that it is better to buy fewer, better quality things that you love and need, and that will last for a long time to come. So for the new elements of our kitchen we didn’t scrimp on the details. The wood we used for the shelves is beautiful and I love it every time I see it. The sink tap is an Evo 184 from Swedish company Tapwell and is a pleasure to use. As you can imagine, we have lots of vintage lights in our home, although we’d have a lot more if the ceilings were higher! In the kitchen, the mirrored ‘mercury’ glass and the copper of our 1920’s GECoRay wall lights complement the colours and textures in the space so well. They were salvaged from a church in Surrey and receive a lot of comments. Our most recent purchase was a steam bent chair by Thonet dated 1890, it was salvaged from the National Theatre in Prague whilst we were on a recent vintage light buying trip.
