A QUIET country lane in sleepy Somerset is home to Britain’s Best Home.
But it isn’t a listed building or a quaint but rather a £250,000 new build that has been transformed into a cosy countryside nest by mum Jade Fish.
The mum-of-two, Jade, entered the house as a ‘wild card’ and never expected to reach the final, let alone beat four other finalists to win the accolade from uFurnish.com .
Eighteen further winners were crowned, including NHS psychiatrist Orima Kamalu, who for £600 instead of the £60,000 quoted, former TV design contestant Ben Irurzun, who turned 84 IKEA drawers into a £3,000-lookalike antique cabinet for £400, and Lancashire mum Emily Barratt, who tiled her own “bathroom of doom” after sacking her plumber.
Here we reveal the winners and their incredible homes….
BEST HOME
Jade Fish, Somerset| Instagram @oursomersetnest
Jade, who has lived in Somerset all her life, bought her house with her husband eight years ago.
As a new-build with oddly shaped walls, it was a blank canvas that she says needed vision and “a lot of love”.
“As a family we love nothing more than getting out into nature, and we’re very lucky to have it on our doorstep,” she says.
“I feel I’ve created the home that best reflects me, my surroundings and my personality. It’s homely and inviting, fresh but cosy. I love my home and all it has to offer.”
BEST BATHROOM
Nick Toteda, London | Instagram @nicktoteda
Nick Toteda and his partner Ant wanted a bathroom that felt like a living room, so they hung curtains instead of a glass shower screen, added cornicing and ran Mandarin Stone tiles floor to ceiling around a huge window. They put in two sinks, but four years on, “we still both use the same one”.
Their four-bedroom Victorian house in Clapham Junction, London, had stood empty for about ten years when they viewed it in 2022, with trees growing inside and rotten joists. Halfway through the build they turned the spare bedroom into the bathroom, which their builders hated.
BEST BEDROOM
Emily Murray, London | Instagram @pinkhouseliving
When Emily Murray’s two sons hit their teens, she turned the top floor of her Edwardian house in Dulwich, London, into a bedroom suite she could escape to.
Behind one door there’s a sitting area, a terrace, a mirrored wet room and the bath she’d always dreamed of, based on a room at Babington House in Somerset but in a softer pink.
Emily, a journalist and author whose boys are now 13 and 16, has renovated the house twice in nine years. A former gymnast, she took up athletics in her 40s and is now British age-group champion in triple jump and long jump.
BEST BEFORE AND AFTER TRANSFORMATION
Emily Barratt, Lancashire | Instagram @our_big_renovation
Emily Barratt’s seven-bedroom house in Lancashire had just one bathroom, so rather than lose a bedroom she squeezed a new one into the top-floor space that once held two water tanks. She calls it “the bathroom of doom”.
Her plasterer cried on the first day, and two months into a job meant to take a fortnight, her plumber still hadn’t done the first fix. After ten weeks Emily, 41, sacked him and tiled the floor and walls herself. “I was like, I’m done with trades,” says Emily, who has 198,000 Instagram followers. It was finished a fortnight later.
BEST DIY CREATION
Ben Irurzun, West Midlands | Instagram @bygonebenagain
Ben Irurzun built the antique-style apothecary cabinet in his kitchen from IKEA drawers for £400, when a real one would have cost around £3,000.
The former Interior Design Masters contestant turned 84 Moppe drawers, some bought second-hand on Facebook, back to front and fitted them into a wooden frame stained to look old.
He found 84 matching handles at an antiques centre, printed vintage French labels and topped it with marble from an old fireplace hearth. It took three or four days. “On the TV show we have to do everything in two days,” he says, “so I learned everything very quickly.”
BEST ENTERTAINING SPACE
Kerry Davison, Newcastle | Instagram @houseofchi
Kerry Davison’s garden on the edge of Newcastle was designed for parties, and her dad did all the work for nothing.
Raymond, 72, a retired engineer, rewired it for a hot tub, put in new drains and fitted the panelling indoors. “My dad should be getting this award,” says Kerry, 41. Her Instagram fans tell him he looks like Harrison Ford.
Kerry, a mum of two, bought the new-build four years ago for £370,000. When the patio doors open, the dining room and garden become one space, and guests spill out to the hot tub and hammock.
BEST FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Suzy Broome, South Yorkshire | Instagram @suzybroome
Suzy Broome laid the tiled path to her bright orange front door herself over a single weekend, and passers-by still stop to admire it. She chose green, orange and yellow tiles to suit her Victorian house in South Yorkshire.
When she moved in, one side of the grey double front door was rotting. Her father-in-law built a new one, and Suzy stripped the other, fitted an antique knocker and brass handles and painted both orange. She has tiled floors and walls in every home she’s lived in, but had never tiled outside before.
BEST HALLWAY
Lara Bezzina, Northamptonshire | Instagram @lara.bezzina
Lara Bezzina fell for her partly Georgian house in Northamptonshire the moment she opened the front door, so the hallway had to give the same welcome.
She and her partner spent weeks laying the diamond-pattern marble floor themselves, built a bench and covered the ceiling rose in gold leaf. “It makes me very happy to come home,” she says.
Lara, who manages a council housing team, bought the four-bedroom house four years ago and has renovated it every evening and weekend since, converting the cellar too. She hopes to finish next year, and admits to decision fatigue.
BEST HOME OFFICE
Tamzin McGillen, Bristol | Instagram @tamzinmcgillen
Tamzin McGillen’s winning office is a converted garage split down the middle, with pink florals and pink chairs on her side and green, wood and a piano on the other, tied together by matching desks.
An interior and textile designer, Tamzin moved into her Bristol house during lockdown in 2020, when every room was grey, and has since filled it with colour right up to the wallpapered ceilings.
A year ago she left her job as a school textiles technician to set up her own design business, and her Instagram following has doubled this year to about 105,000.
BEST INTERIOR CONTENT CREATOR
Maxine Austin, Cambridge | Instagram @maxine.home
Maxine Austin, 38, won for showing her 180,000-plus followers what renovating a 1970s house really looks like with four boys under six: DIY squeezed in around the children, childproof paint and second-hand furniture.
“With kids it takes away the preciousness,” she says. “I don’t have time to worry about the sofas.”
Maxine, who works in marketing, bought the four-bedroom house near Cambridge with her husband eight years ago. It needed more work than anything else they viewed, but a project was the only way they could afford the area.
BEST KITCHEN
Peter Irvine, County Antrim, Northern Ireland | Instagram @thewhitehome
Peter Irvine’s winning kitchen in County Antrim has wooden cupboards, whitewashed walls and a stone sink, with a long wooden table in the middle so everyone can eat together and plenty of room for guests.
BEST LIVING ROOM
Natasha Landers, London | Instagram @untillemonsrsweet
Natasha Landers’ dad told her the living room looked like an art installation, before she had even hung any art.
She wanted to try colour blocking without just painting the chimney breast, so she did the ceiling and cornicing in a light bronze green and ran a stripe of colour from ceiling to floor and across the shutters.
A gallerist and collector, Natasha has lived in her Walthamstow home in east London for 25 years and now hires it out as a filming location. The green sofa is an IKEA one she had for 15 years before having it re-covered.
BEST NURSERY OR CHILDREN’S ROOM
Lisa Weaver, Hertford | Instagram @lisaweaverhome
Lisa Weaver dreaded the day her son would need a ceiling hoist. “They’re always ugly things,” she says. When he grew too heavy to carry upstairs, she pictured him floating across his new downstairs bedroom like a jellyfish, and turned it into an underwater world.
Her son, seven, has a rare genetic syndrome she says only one other person in the UK has.
Lisa, a mum of three from Hertford, had the tracks made in dark jade green against an aqua ceiling and sewed sea-creature covers for his electric headboard. “Doing his room is almost a love language for me,” she says.
BEST ON A BUDGET
Orima Kamalu, Bristol | Instagram @alittledetached
Quoted about £60,000 for a new kitchen, NHS psychiatrist Orima Kamalu and her husband Joel, a GP, did it themselves for £590.
With a four-year-old and a baby to look after, they learned everything from what Orima calls “the University of YouTube”.
They fitted MDF Shaker-style doors, painted the units black, retiled the walls and painted the worktops over a weekend with a £100 kit.
“A lot of people said, ‘Are you really going black?’” she says. “I’m not going to say it’s like a brand new kitchen, but it looks so much more like us.”
BEST SEASONAL STYLING
Pandora Maxton | Instagram @pandora.maxton
Pandora Maxton’s York home changes with every occasion. The tablescaper and interior stylist who calls herself “Mrs Christmas’ has been obsessed with the festive season since childhood – and nothing has changed now that she’s a mother of three.
Each year brings a new excuse to create a big, bold tree to serve as a joyous Christmas centrepiece, whether bedecked with dried hydrangeas, tiny disco balls or Ralph Lauren-style deep red ornaments.
Pandora, who has 199,000 followers on Instagram and has already appeared in House Beautiful’s Christmas issue, also teaches wreath-making and makes her own advent calendars and sacks. At Halloween her table is filled with tiny pumpkins and spooky candles, and last Easter she made a wreath of tiny hand-painted eggs.
BEST USE OF COLOUR
Laura Hall, Merseyside | Instagram @thehexagonalhouse
Laura Hall plans every room in her Merseyside home around colour, using it to set the mood and pick out details people might miss, from a window recess to the stairs and ceiling. Even as a child she insisted on unusual colour schemes for her bedroom.
A mum of two, Laura started her Instagram when the family began renovating around 2020 and, at 38, changed career to create interiors content full time. Followers often tell her that her posts have given them the confidence to be braver in their own homes.
OVERALL PUBLIC VOTE
Astrid Dolan, London | Instagram @astriddolan
Two months after her husband died suddenly in January 2025, Astrid Dolan started work on her two daughters’ bedrooms, and those rooms have now won her the public vote. “It became my therapy, my safe space,” she says. “It helped me turn some of my sadness into strength.”
Astrid, whose girls are now six and three, decided to stay in her London home and make it a proper home instead.
She worried people would think she wanted sympathy when she began sharing her grief on Instagram, but her account is now a community for widows, single parents and anyone going through a big change.
Deirdre Mc Gettrick, who launched uFurnish.com after struggling to furnish her own home, said: “Best Home is the award everyone wants, and Jade’s house proves you don’t need a big old period property to win it.
“She took a new-build with awkward walls and made it feel completely like her, and she did it around a full-time job and two little boys.
“We saw that right across this year’s finalists. So many of them had done the work themselves, in the evenings and at weekends, often with young children at their feet. With moving so expensive, people are putting their money and their energy into the house they’ve already got, and they’re proud of it.
“These awards celebrate real homes and the people who make them, and this year’s winners show what you can do with a bit of vision, a lot of graft and, in one case, a £100 worktop paint kit.”
