One of the delights of the Island’s older town houses is that you only need to take a few steps inside the front door to enter a different world from that of the busy street outside. Owners may have modernised them, but when it is skilfully done there is the sense of a real retreat which combines the best of past and present.

This terraced period house is especially blessed, in that you can walk right through it – the hall floor still has the original Victorian tiles – and out into a sunny walled garden bright with flowers, white-painted greenhouses and iron garden furniture. The existence of such a garden cannot be predicted from the street, which makes it all the more pleasurable when you arrive in it. It almost certainly looks prettier now than ever before in its long history.

The tall, narrow, five-floor house – complete with cellar and attic – was bought some time after the death of the previous owner, whose family had lived here for more than 100 years. It had never been a grand house, and happily there were no inappropriate modernisations to be undone. The owner enlisted the help of James Vickers’ Complete Construction Services to carry out the limited number of structural alterations necessary.

Foremost among these were to open the ground floor back room, which would have been the original kitchen but had been used as a small sitting room, out into what was nothing more than a lean-to extension. The back room is now a fairly narrow kitchen once more, the stone of its original fireplace wall left exposed and a comforting Rayburn stove installed in front of it. Pine units, toning well with parquet flooring, line the opposite wall.