Jobe Burns and Hanna Ali Bring New Life to a Celebrity’s 300-Year-Old Farmhouse

The front door gives way to a world of weathered oak beams, warm brick inglenooks, and the muted glow of stained glass. Light bounces off centuries-old plaster, skimming over surfaces that have been touched, restored, and shaped by hand. This 18th-century farmhouse in the English countryside doesn’t really feel like a newly completed renovation, but rather a home that has absorbed a well-lived life, its layers of history preserved as it was gently brought into the present. British sculptor and designer Jobe Burns led the slow architectural transformation for more than four years, preserving what time had worn in and carefully revealing what could be coaxed back to life. Oak doors were revived, a 300-year-old staircase restored, and every floorboard lifted, relaid, and polished by hand.

When interior stylist Hanna Ali, behind Hoechitecture, stepped in, she brought not just objects, but an intimacy and texture that softened the historic bones into something poetic. “Jobe had been working on the architecture of this house for four and a half years – basically since I met him,” she tells Something Curated. “Our first real conversations about it started with lighting. I was obsessed with glass, especially vintage lighting from Murano, so we went on a road trip around Europe to go and get some. On that trip we developed a visual language…”

Alongside the usual markers of excellent taste in design – including objects and furniture by Gaetano Pesce, Mario Bellini, and Verner Panton – found and salvaged pieces together with handmade touches like dried citrus adorned candle holders populate the space. “The architecture set the tone, and we responded to it,” Ali explains. “Much of it started from colour – palettes Jobe set from the stained glass, the door textures, the bedroom colours. Sometimes we’d set a main object first and then I’d add small nuances around it. It was more about answering to the building than to each other.”

Her approach is instinctive and romantic, rooted in her background as a painter. “I like to approach each area as if it’s a contemporary painting – always looking for something emotive, whether it’s the form language of furniture, twigs from outside turned into a chandelier, or layering uniquely coloured textiles that reference fashion. Often homes can look too perfect, too clean… The intimacy is in the quirks.” These quirks reveal themselves as you move from room to room: a pair of vintage speakers serving as stands, a coffee table made from a fallen tree outside, hundreds of hand-blown glass flowers rescued from Burns’ mother’s lighting shop.

Ali sourced enthusiastically, often from her network of young designers, sometimes from the local salvage yard, and frequently online. “Each interior piece, whether it was existing from the client or we placed it, was personal and a niche obsession of ours… The blue light in the black room came from Facebook Marketplace. We drove to Pescara, Italy and paid €80 for something worth over €3,000… The Carlo Nason light near the bookshelf came from near Bologna, where a man opened his garage to reveal heaps of vintage lighting… A lot of it came from using what we had and responding instinctively to how colours worked together… Sometimes we’d start with an object and build the space around it – like the candle flame in the bedroom, which felt like it could have been pulled straight from a Caravaggio scene.”

She continues, “It was about making this 300-year-old house feel young – but like a young person with an old soul. You can’t put something overly modern into a house this settled and you wouldn’t want to. Instead, we leaned into materials and objects that felt like they could have been made from the garden or found down the road.” Without feeling overly planned, there is intentionality present. Stained glass panels, embedded in doors and walls, weave a calming continuity through the rooms, while vintage Persian rugs anchor contemporary accents in a rich sense of history. Ali adds, “Our biggest goal was to make the house feel comforting. It’s not a vacation home – it’s a place to be yourself, away from the city.”



Photography by Felix Speller and Hanna Ali