The feeling he didn’t know he was designing for — until his clients kept finding it too
An Article By: Glenn Cavill Architecture
Once there was a man who lived at the edge of the sea. Every summers morning he surfed in water still cold from the night. He went to work, wet hair and still feeling the salty air.. In the evening he sat outside with his wife, coffee going cold in his hand, a book on hygge open and unread on the table beside him — watching the light do something slow and gold over the water, and he thought: I could stay in this feeling forever.
The book stayed closed for weeks. He didn’t need a Danish word for what he already had. That, it turns out, is the tell. Hygge is a lovely idea — candlelight, wool blankets, the art of being cosy on purpose — but it’s also proof of how far removed most of us are, most of the year, from feeling at ease in our own homes: that we needed to import a word for it at all, hygge. On holiday, you are living the meaning, the pure definition of your happy place, living your best life.
I’ll tell you who he was later in this piece. But hold that image for a moment, because it matters more than it looks.
— The light that wakes you gently on a Tuesday, not just when you’re somewhere warm.
— The terrace you step onto without thinking, coffee still in hand.
— A kitchen that goes quiet the moment you actually need it to.
— The bath that feels like the one in the villa — every night, not once a year.
— A view held back all day, so it still has something to say by evening.
For years, the man didn’t live like that. He lived like most of us do — early starts, calendar days, a house that did its job without ever really holding him. Then, for a monent one summer, something shifted. The light was the same light. The coffee was the same coffee. But everything around him had been arranged, without him quite noticing, to let him stop.
In twenty years of designing homes, I have never once had a client walk into a first meeting and say, “I want my house to feel like it did on holiday.” They ask for more glazing. A bigger kitchen. Somewhere for the grandchildren to sleep. It’s only partway through the process — once we’ve spent real time understanding how they actually live, not just how they entertain — that the truth tends to surface. What they’ve been describing, in a dozen practical requests, is that same feeling. They simply hadn’t had the language for it, because no one had asked them to notice it before.
That’s the real discovery behind the work we do. Not a style, not a trend — a pattern we’ve watched repeat, client after client, house after house. The ease of a holiday isn’t a mystery. It’s a home with the friction removed and the good things left within easy reach. Once you see it that way, you can start designing for it deliberately, all year round — not just for a fortnight in August.
We call the discipline behind this The Cavill Method™. It isn’t a look, and it can’t be specified from a mood board. It’s a way of listening hard enough, early enough, that the architecture ends up doing what a holiday does naturally: removing friction, extending light, making stillness available on demand rather than by appointment. A well-designed home shouldn’t need a departure lounge and a long-haul flight to deliver that feeling. It should be waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
As for the man at the start of this piece — he was me, several summers ago, on a coastline not far from where I now build. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the morning the real question began: why does this feel like I am on holiday and how have I created a home environment that feels like that 2 week holiday? Everything I have designed since has been an attempt to answer it — for my own family first, and now for the families who trust us with theirs.
Discreet. Aspirational. Remarkably Personal.
Glenn Cavill is the founder of Glenn Cavill Architecture, a luxury residential practice with studios across North Wales, Chester, London, Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh. glenncavill.com
He will be at Grand Designs Live NEC between 2 – 4 October 2026 where he will be offering free one-to-one consultations.
