Smitten by houses in the English countryside, this Kansas City family was determined to re-create the look in their new home, yet maintain an informal style of living.

By Steve Slack. Photographs by Bill Matthews.

Imperfect Perfection

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004)

Horses cavort in a 50-acre pasture. Bass lurk in a tranquil pond. Frogs chirrup from a trickling stream. And in the midst of it all sits a home, built to embrace this casual nature.

For Megan and Mark Sutherland and their sons, Billy (8) and Beau (14), and daughter, Paige (17), living formally is a foreign concept. They built their cedar-shingled beauty on part of a family farm preserved close to the heart of the greater Kansas City area, with the idea that the home was going to be filled with extended family, friends and assorted beasts, such as the pampered pack of canines that lounge on sofas or eye visitors from the floor.

The lush property could easily have been transplanted from a copse in the Cotswolds, the hilly area in the southwest of England that inspired the family's home.

"We had a vacation there," Mark says, "and we just loved the way the English lived in those stately old homes that look so formal, but feel so casualthe muddy boots in the hallway, the dogs and cats everywhere, and furniture you could just plop on."

So when they began building their own home 10 years ago next to the homes of parents and siblings on the family property, Megan and Mark tried to re-create that beloved sense of threadbare gentry living in rooms burnished with aged patina.

"We didn't want a big house, just a cozy one," Megan says. But, Mark says, things got out of hand. "It kept growing on the plans. We'd say, well we need to add a foot here, or a foot there. It didn't look very big on the blueprints, but when we stood at the excavation and saw the hole, we said, 'What have we done?'"

Megan, along with designer George Turbovitch, went to work warming up the spacious rooms with furnishings and architectural detailing designed to bring comfort to all living things great and small. "I wanted the 'bones' of the house to be right," she says. "If the basics are there, you could live in it empty, and it would still be right."

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