Patience is sometimes necessary when it comes to achieving the perfect home. By the time the building work began on Sara and Dom Allom’s semi-detached Victorian cottage, the family had lived there for ten years and knew exactly what changes they wanted to make. The small house, where the front door opened into the sitting room, was expanded to the side, to the rear, and up. ‘There were no neutral spaces like halls and landings,’ Sara recalls.
In 2006, she and Dom had moved from Fulham in West London to the leafy village of Pirbright in Surrey, and for the first ten years their two boys
