Losing your job can be a traumatic experience, but when it happened to Luke Moorby he and his partner Anna Lundberg decided to treat it as an opportunity to reframe their life.
The couple, who have two young children, relocated from a Clapham flat to a detached house in the coastal town of Poole, in Dorset, exchanging the discomfort and frustration of wasting hours commuting and navigating the gridlocked streets of London for runs and bike rides by the sea and family outings to the New Forest.
“We love it,” says Anna. “I was brought up in Surrey and lived in Geneva for 10 years, where it was all lakes and mountains, and we both wanted to live by the sea one day.”
Anna’s journey towards a work life balance that worked began early.
In 2013 she quit her corporate marketing job and set up her own business as a leadership development expert & executive coach.
She and Luke were tied to London by his job in advertising. So when he was made redundant in 2019 it was a chance to shake things up, not least because they had just had their daughter, Sofia, now five.
“I think that Luke felt that advertising was a young man’s game,” says Anna, 42.
Luke, 47, decided to retrain as a building surveyor, and the couple began house hunting in Poole.
They easily found a buyer for their three-bedroom garden flat in London and in spring 2021 the family – including Zack, now four – moved to the south coast. “
Their first task was to radically upgrade their “ugly duckling house” – adding an extra top floor which brought the bedroom count from three to six, and extending the kitchen.
Financially the move wasn’t a budget option. Although their London flat sold for circa £800,000 their new home cost around the same, not including the cost of the build.
“It is definitely worth more now than we have spent,” said Anna. “But we don’t want to move so that doesn’t make any difference to us.”
Moving during the pandemic meant Anna and Luke had got used to going without trips to the theatre and fancy dinners before the move. And they have discovered some great compensations.
“It used to take us half an hour to get out of Clapham,” said Anna. “Now, half an hour and we are in the New Forest.
“I go running along the beach, and it is such a lovely place for the kids to grow up. They have much more freedom than they would in London.”
