< img alt="leila el kayem sophie mayer devon home studio modern home" src ="https://www.remodelista.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/leila-el-kayem-sophie-mayer-devon-home-studio-modern-house-733x1066.jpg"/ > Influenced by Margot’s post last week on the excellent, nontraditional cooking areas she identified on the websites of European realty firms, I discovered myself perusing the listings of my preferred U.K. firm, The Modern House, and there, I came across an especially dreamy offering: a rambling two-acre, multi-building residential or commercial property purchased by a set of artists, Leila El-Kayem and Sophie Mayer, who lovingly changed the worn out Victorian walled garden into a trendy retreat that’s appealingly rough around the edges.
The 2 creatives (Leila is a conceptual artist and poet; Sophie is a painter) employed architecture firm McClean Quinlan to assist them change the garden into a two-bedroom home that take advantage of the “feral” landscape of the location. “There’s something about walking into an untamed space that provides you consent to end up being untamed yourself,” Sophie told The Modern Home’s Journal. “It minimized us back to an instinctive lifestyle, which ended up being really humbling and formative for both of us.”
“We wished to maintain as much as possible of what was currently here,” continued Leila. “So we worked with the existing materials to make certain that we honoured what came before us, protecting the romanticism of the ruin. We have not knocked anything down. We just tried to keep the integrity of what’s here and slowly repair it.”
Here’s a peek at their enjoyed, lived-in retreat. Head here for the complete interview and here for the listing.
Photography by Paul Whitbread, courtesy of The Modern House.
Above: Imagined here is the primary structure on the property, “a bothy “that Leila and Sophie had converted into a home. Likewise on the grounds is a greenhouse and a painting studio that was as soon as the website of a squash court. 
< img src="https://www.remodelista.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/leila-el-kayem-sophie-mayer-devon-home-studio-modern-house-2-733x489.jpg" alt="the entryway leads right into this long open kitchen and dining-room.
18" width="733" height="489"/ > Above: The entryway leads right into this long open cooking area and dining room.