As featured in March edition of Wiltshire Living magazine.

After selling our flat in Brighton, we were forced to postpone our move to Pennsylvania due to the global pandemic. We did not want to stay put and we knew an adventure was imminent.

My partner and I had spent a lot of time in Dorset and it was always somewhere we considered living. So once the apartment in Brighton was sold we instructed our removal company to head for the West country to the small town of Shaftesbury, which is an old market town made famous back in the day by the “Hovis bread ad” filmed on Gold Hill.

I travelled numerous times from East Sussex to Dorset to try and find a nice cottage to rent. They were either too small, had low ceilings or would not allow dogs. A friend tipped me off about an old pub that was up for lease in Enmore Green, Shaftesbury. Since closing the landlord had split the pub into two spaces – one into our cottage and the other half laid dormant awaiting change of planning consent.

I arranged a viewing and once inside knew it could be a beautiful home for me, my partner and our two Weimaraners. The spaces were quite big although depressing with years of tarnished paint and the sitting room to be was the old snooker room. It had a generous commercial kitchen with two good-sized bedrooms upstairs with the addition of a dressing room and an old boot room that I knew would make a perfect studio for me!

It did have some redeeming features, lovely window seats and nice flagstones on the floor. A very generous courtyard which is south facing and gets a lot of sun where our dogs like to lounge, great place to sit in a chair and read and perfect for Alfresco dining.

I bought my favourite neutral heritage colour Farrow and Ball Pointing and hired a painter to paint the whole cottage to get rid of the dark paint and decades of nicotine stains.

Hired a local carpenter and handyman to put up some beautiful reclaimed tongue and groove to cover up the dreary stone walls, lots of shelves to house all my books and a woodburner to make it cosy and to have a focus in the sitting room.

I kept some of the floors with the original floorboards and got a natural coir put down over the rest of the floors.

I have two lovely Howard sofas that I got loose covers made for and found a lovely old wingback armchair at the local flea market, which I had recovered in a really lovely Irish tweed.

I was recommended to a person who specialised in soft furnishings, Thomasin and got her to work making me curtains, cushions, roman blinds and my footstool had a makeover in some lovely Mulberry home fabric and put up some traditional wallpaper to break up the new freshly painted walls.
Pattern was introduced to the bedroom with linens and bedspreads and bred new life into some antique lamp bases with some pleated patterned shades
I discovered Frome reclamation yard in Somerset and got some nice old doors to replace the ones that were missing and replaced the missing ironmongery. I found some old enamel factory shades in the corners of the yard and have been cleaned lighting up the landing area. The reclamation yard was well worth a visit finding a nice haul of Victorian tiles that I used in the upstairs bathroom.

I was very strict with my paintings and objet choices and found a lovely old Cornish dresser at the weekend antique market on the coast in Bridport to fill it with the selected possessions  I like free-standing kitchens and have quite a lot of kitchenware so I was very pleased when my dresser, old larder cupboard and 6ft butcher’s block all fitted in the ample sized kitchen.
I flanked the floors with old durrie rugs to add warmth and texture as I curated the rooms to make us a lovely cottage to live in for the next few years.