First aid for facades

Ever since 'Changing Rooms' hit our TV screens, makeovers have been all about interiors. But the ugliest of homes can be transformed with the application of exterior design

Never before have the insides of the homes of Britain been the subject of so much attention, cash and clever stuff made out of MDF. Our kitchens and bathrooms have been gutted, decluttered and decked out with dazzling taps from Philippe Starck. Our bedrooms and sitting rooms have been exhaustively made over in tasteful creams and taupes. As a nation, we have been well and truly bombarded by TV programmes, books and magazines into adopting a collective mania for interiors.

But the style-police beat appears to end at the front door. The outsides of our houses have been woefully ignored. Well, have you ever heard of a magazine called "Exteriors"? And yet they make the first and often the greatest impression on the outside world – particularly when the time comes to sell. Many people feel that, while it is perfectly possible to work miracles on a beaten-up bathroom, a boring, box-like Sixties exterior or ugly Fifties fascia is beyond redemption. They're wrong. A few clever tricks – and a reasonable stash of cash – can transform even the most uninspiring house into the sort of property likely to attract admiring crowds of neighbours, and most particularly eager buyers.

The new breed of "exterior designers" almost inevitably start with the windows. Change them to the right shape, size and material and the house will often be instantly improved. Yolande Hesse, of Back to Front Exterior Design, a thriving business that opens its first high-street outlet in Farnham, Surrey, today, explains: "The postwar building boom of the Fifties and Sixties saw a lot of housing being thrown up in haste without a thought for the age-old architectural rules of classical proportion. This meant you ended up with a lot of unsuitable windows that didn't suit the house and just looked like big, ugly, black holes. Get the windows right and you will get a harmonic, welcoming effect."

Margaret Keir and her husband, a builder, transformed their 1959 box in Henley into a minor local attraction (and much bigger house) for £100,000. They also started with the windows. "They were all asymetric, some square, some rectangular with no rhyme or reason. All 100 houses in the estate were the same, but we wanted to make ours look different and stunning, yet without looking gimmicky.

"I'm a stickler for symmetry, having been dragged round endless stately homes and cathedrals by my mother as a child. Now all my windows are a multiple of 600mm, being exactly once or twice that width. That mathematical harmony is far more restful on the eye."

Hesse, meanwhile, has firm rules of thumb concerning window size and design: they should be about twice as high as they are wide; they should be portrait-shaped rather than landscape (taller than they are wide); and all the windows in a house should relate in size and shape to each other.

The effects of exterior renovation can be astonishing. One client's large, rambling postwar house was transformed from a rather forbidding, untidy property into a highly covetable and stylish mini-mansion by the simple device of ripping out the large picture windows and replacing them with French windows interspersed by brick pillars. The other windows – old metal casements – were replaced with timber frames that complemented the French windows below. Repainting the white walls cream – "white often looks grey in our climate, while cream looks softer and warmer" – completed the simple, but highly effective makeover.

In the Hesses' own house, the dullest Sixties box imaginable, she replaced the huge landscape windows at the front with pairs of smaller, traditional wooden sashes. But here she went further, replacing the ugly brown concrete roofing tiles with tasteful slates and clay finials and ridge tiles.

She then painted the tile hangings and brickwork cream, and broke up the flat, boring back elevation with quite a daring, contemporary extension to give both more room inside and a better-looking exterior "with interesting corners for a courtyard". Even here, while installing yet more modern windows, she has observed the classical rules of proportion, and the new windows are taller than they are wide.

The overall effect is remarkable – a standard Sixties box has become a highly desirable residence with a touch of New England, and when it was completed four years ago, the work cost just £80,000. Clearly, far more has been added to the value of the house. Hesse recommends using natural materials like wood and slate wherever possible – she abhors plastic windows, for instance – and draws heavily on traditional vernacular British housing designs for inspiration.

Margaret Keir also favoured natural materials in the renovation of her home, replacing her "nasty dark brown concrete hanging tiles, which looked they had a bad attack of acne" with warm-looking clay tiles that "are a lot smarter and warmer and really glow in the evening sun".

Natural, local materials and styles, ignored by architects for decades, can often supply the solution to a seemingly intractable problem. "When I came here from Australia 30 years ago, I was bowled over by the wealth of architectural heritage here and have used elements of it ever since in my work," Hesse says.

She has, for example, used Gothic-style windows to transform both an ugly Fifties house into a Regency-style villa (for just £20,000), and a Sixties farmhouse built like a barracks into a country dwelling of which Jane Austen would be proud (a project currently still at the drawings stage). Flat roof extensions have been transformed with cornicing at the eaves and attractive lantern lights "to give more light to the inside while making it look that the flat roof was there for a purpose".

Yet the traditional touch is not the only way. An unfortunate Sixties bungalow, with a "dog's breakfast" of window styles, had been dubbed the "airport lounge" by locals and had proved virtually unsaleable despite its large garden and terrific location.

The current owners bit the bullet and bought the three-bedroom house for a bargain £380,000 four years ago. Now worth nearer £900,000, it is unrecognisable. Its exterior has been redesigned by Hesse and completed for a total of £100,000. The large picture and landscape windows have made way for tall, elegant, contemporary replacements – "this sort of rectangle is particularly harmonic at the moment" – and the front porch area has been filled in to give better symmetry.

One wall, punctuated by window-sized holes, has been built out at 90 degrees both for design interest and to give more privacy to the sitting room beyond. The overall effect is now less airport lounge, more Californian show home. A scruffy local landmark has been replaced with a deeply covetable one.

Back to Front Exterior Design 01252 820984. Prices for consultation and drawings start from £450 per elevation, with more detailed drawings at £1,300- £1,500. Hesse warns transformations cannot be done on the cheap, not least because of the cost of good, new windows. Budget for at least £100,000 but expect to make more than that on resale. For more information, visit www.backtofrontexteriordesign.com. Her shop also displays tiles, windows and other exterior ranges in the same way as an interiors shop would stock curtain fabrics and carpets.