LUCY Judd appeared to have it all – a great husband, Dominic, a wonderful baby and an 18th century cottage home with roses round the door and sheep in the neighbouring field in exquisite Bodiam in East Sussex.

But Lucy, 31, was itching for something more. Most days she would jump in the car and drive 90 minutes just to be with friends. “There was no one likeminded nearby,” she recalls. “Most of them had never even been out of the area.”

There were no decent shops close by, either, and certainly no health club or amenities for mothers with young babies.

Lucy missed her past life as a property consultant for Ernst & Young, when she and Dominic had been one of Clapham’s Dinky couples – duel income, no kids yet.

All that changed overnight when their baby, Henrietta, came along in 2001.

They decided to move to the country, not realising it would mean a three-hour commute for Dominic, who recruits surveyors, nor how much their lifestyle would change. Says Lucy: “I morphed out of all recognition; I was miserable.”

A year ago, they moved again, but not back to London. They now live in another 18th century house – complete with Aga, beams and rambling outbuildings – also in East Sussex. But this time they chose a location near Fletching, close to busy Uckfield and easy for trains at Haywards Heath. Everything they need is now on their doorstep.

The move has prompted Lucy to turn her unhappy experience to good use. She has started a home-search company, Simply Sussex, which shows people how to avoid emotional and expensive mistakes when they move house – and to get it right first time. She charges a registration fee of £600 for a 26-week period, plus 1 per cent of the purchase price.

People’s first problem, she says, is a lack of time: “What should you do when you don’t have enough time to look, or when you are fed up with wasted journeys to see unsuitable properties, or when you don’t know the area terribly well and are frustrated by continually chasing agents?

Obviously, you should use a search company.” She is bouncing another new arrival, baby Freddie, on her knee.

Her questioning of clients goes beyond what type of house they want, to cover their transport, amenity, leisure, school and childcare needs.

“This is the crux,” says Lucy, who runs her company in between looking after the two children. “People make the mistake of concentrating on the ideal property – that chocolate-box cottage, say – instead of things like the commute, schooling and their children’s future needs.”

Some clients recently came to her with a specific property in mind.

“What they didn’t know was it had been on the market for a year and the price had been cut dramatically. They just thought it was great. It is only later that they discovered the plans for new houses opposite. But I already knew about them and could have saved them loads of time.

“In one case, I also knew about a busy road junction nearby that gets really noisy at rush hour. But whenever the clients came down it was evening and quiet. All they saw was a peaceful place.

“Also, in London, people often live in Victorian houses with big windows. In a cottage you may get low beams and a dark room, and in 17th and 18th century houses there is also a lot to go wrong.”

FOR her lifestyle, Lucy now has the perfect home. She has friends and a great primary school nearby, and a 10-minute drive to a good gym.

CLOSE your eyes and imagine you are on a long-haul flight; now open them. This contemporary steel, glass and timber house might be in Malibu or overlooking the harbour in Sydney, but actually, it is in south London. It belongs to Eric Lanlard, 36, a pastry chef from Brittany – supplier of gateaux to Fortnum & Mason and owner of Savoir Design, which produces extravagant celebration cakes – and his partner, Paul Newrick, who runs an aviation leasing company.

Their detached house, built by architect HM2 in 2001, sits away from the road, behind video-controlled gates: a modern cube approached by a Big Brother-style timber-decked path.

“A change from our last home,” admits Lanlard, in his strong French accent. “We lived for seven years in a tall, Victorian terrace house in Putney. We modernised it totally – but with old houses you always have to start again. When more cracks began appearing, we just got bored.”

Prior to that, the couple had experienced loft living in the penthouse of a converted match factory in Bow. They rather fancied living like that again.

“We decided to look for a plot on which to build,” says Lanlard, sitting on one of the simple Habitat dining chairs, which they covered in brightly coloured velvets. “The week after we put our home on the market, we saw this house in a magazine. We knew we wanted it, just from what we could see of the outside. We would probably have built something very similar to this anyway.”

The 2,097sq ft property cost £1 million a year ago. “We spent two nights unable to sleep, because we couldn’t afford it,” Lanlard admits. Then they discovered that the owner, a developer, was in a rush to move. So they persuaded him to let them pay a deposit, with another six months to complete. It was not until the week before they moved in that they finally managed to raise the money, thanks to the sale of their Putney home.

TO THE front and rear of the cube house are walls of full-height glass doors, which slide back completely, creating a continuous living space between the house and two garden areas. The steel frame of the building is exposed in an atrium, which has a glass roof. Upstairs there are huge windows everywhere, including internal ones – so ubiquitous are these, you have to remember to pull down a blind when you visit the bathroom.

The open-plan living/kitchen area is white, with more white – white on the wall, white kitchen units and even a white grand piano (this extravagant object can be programmed via a CD-rom to play all by itself). A feeling of space is created by the use of limestone tiles that are laid throughout the ground floor and then out to the garden areas. The space-boosting tricks don’t stop there: holes are punched through the steel in the treads of the glass-sided staircase, the glass coffee table and the windows in every direction all help to cast light around the double-height gallery area.

“The perfect place for summer entertaining, weather permitting,” says Lanlard, of the open-plan area running out to the gardens. “We can fit 100 people in here and the gardens, and our dining table, which normally seats 10, can be extended to 18.”

The house has exposed pipework for air-conditioning, underfloor heating, elaborate lighting and a sound system from Bose that provides wraparound music everywhere from tiny speakers. It’s all very hi-tech, but it still feels cosy.

“We wanted it to be warm. It took ages to find contemporary furniture that was comfy, stuff you could sink into without hurting your back,” says Lanlard. Two swivel leather armchairs and a matching plum leather sofa with a curved back did the business, but cost £15,000. “The sofa seats eight people happily, though,” he reveals.

The developer’s style is seen in the bathrooms, with their taupe anthracite tiles, sleek frameless glass shower enclosures, double-ended Bette baths, modern fittings and large cabinets to hide the clutter.

Similar taste is exhibited in the guest suite, which has a contemporary white B&B Italia bed in the middle of the room, floating shelves and jute curtains – “Yes, they’re sackcloth,” laughs Lanlard.

Did they do any work on the house? “We just knocked down a wall between two bedrooms to make a large master bedroom and extended a few walls for our furniture.” One wall was lengthened to fit their big, glass-fronted cabinet. Constructed of nine glass-and-steel boxes, it has remote-controlled lights that change colour inside and help to set the mood on the outside. “It’s our most expensive piece,” sighs Lanlard. “About £20,000.”

Upstairs they laid a violet carpet in the master bedroom and painted the walls mauve. A faux leopard-bedspread adds to the drama. The walk-in dressing rooms are piled with Louis Vuitton luggage.

“I’m the freak who collects Louis Vuitton,” laughs Lanlard, who has lived in Britain for 15 years. Outside, on the gallery, he has hung a horizontal painting vertically. The artist painted one of the panels using a baguette instead of a brush.

Ah, the French influence …

‘Our £20,000 light show’

The dining table may seat 18 and the grand piano play all by itself, but the most astonishing object in the house is the £20,000 wall of illuminated storage cabinets – made up of nine glass boxes. Eric Lanlard (above) says the unit is the pair’s most expensive purchase, but its remote-controlled coloured lighting (below) can be set to suit any mood …

WHERE TO GET THE LOOK

Limestone floor tiles from Stone Age (020 7384 9090; www.estone.co.uk)
Kitchen and bathroom from Alternative Plans (020 7228 6460; www.alternative-plans.co.uk)
Lutron for the lighting system (0800 282107; www.lutron.com)
Candela for recessed lighting (020 7720 4480; www.candela.ltd.uk)
Habitat for dining chairs (0845 601 0740; www.habitat.net)
Velvet for dining chairs from Today Interiors (01476 574401; www.today-interiors.co.uk)
Dining table is from The Collection (01962 771773; www.the collection.uk.com)
Sound system from Bose (0800 085 9021)
Self-playing piano from Markson Pianos (0800 074 8980)