In 2021, the designer Naemi Prahm, 44, and her husband, architect Tim Norman, 43, began restoring a modest granite cottage in the yard of his family’s 17th-century farm on Jersey, in the Channel Islands. At the time Prahm was working alongside designer Ilse Crawford, at Studio Ilse, and Norman ran his own London-based architectural practice focusing on residential projects from Cumbria to Fife to the Channel Islands. What started as a side project and a rescue mission to restore the property at the request of Norman’s parents – they are the 12th generation to occupy the main, adjoining farmhouse – slowly evolved into something altogether more transformative. Over the years the three-bedroom dwelling, which is known as Le Clocheton (“small bell tower”) for its still operational chime, has been inhabited by Norman’s grandmother, Marguerite, a pair of great great aunts and a farming couple and their cow. But it then lay empty for two decades. When the couple took it on, its interior hadn’t been touched since the 1980s. “The house was not initially being restored for anyone in particular,” says Prahm. “The original idea was just to stop it falling apart.” But as they got to work, she says, a bigger, more compelling thought began to percolate: could this house actually be for them?
