A refreshingly individual take on country-cottage style

It is a not uncommon story. A London couple buys a country cottage when their children are small as an escape from the city. They spend several happy years going there at weekends, but then toddlers become teenagers and they want to spend more time in town. Over the next few years, the cottage becomes rather unloved and forlorn, but the children finally grow up and then…

As this couple from west London explain, ‘We had a big confrontation, with my husband being a country boy and wanting to hang on to the place and me – having grown up in the city and never having “got” the country – wanting to be rid of it. So, in the end, we came up with a compromise: I agreed to keep the house on condition we did it up so that it had proper wifi and secure windows, and I wasn’t constantly being terrorised by spiders and silverfish.’

What happened next, though, is rather less common. Instead of just getting in a local builder, the owners assembled what they now refer to as the ‘dream team’ of interior designer Sarah Delaney, architect Barnaby Gunning and garden designer Butter Wakefield. The result is a delightful, finely executed and refreshingly individual take on country-cottage style, which is full of quirky ideas.

Sarah, whose work has featured many times in House & Garden, is based in Notting Hill and has an enviable roster of famous clients, but she still works from home with a small team. Like the majority of her jobs, this one came through word of mouth. ‘We were working to a fairly tight budget,’ she explains. ‘So I reused quite a lot of things the owners already had, and persuaded them to keep some things they would otherwise have thrown away.’ Sofas were re-covered, pictures reframed and rehung, and the downstairs loo plastered with Crystal Palace football-club memorabilia (the husband is a big fan).

Meanwhile, Barnaby set to work on the structure of the building. The thatched cottage, which dates back to the seventeenth century, is listed and stands on the edge of a pretty Oxfordshire hamlet. It had been extended in the Fifties and again in the Eighties but, as Barnaby explains, ‘the Fifties extension turned out to be made from smelly and highly flammable old oil-soaked railway sleepers, so we had to completely rebuild it’.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Garden designer Butter Wakefield's house is a slice of the country in the city

Replacing an awkward Eighties flight of stairs with a spiral staircase (beautifully crafted by carpenter Brian Jones) saved space and also opened up a landing that connects the first-floor bedrooms. Instead of a solid central post, the staircase wraps around what Barnaby describes as a spiral ribbon, ‘We made it by laminating up birch plywood to form a hollow post.’

The front door used to lead straight into the sitting room, but Sarah came up with the idea of inserting a wall of bookshelves to create a separate hallway, giving both rooms more definition. With off-white walls and a pale grey painted-wood floor, the sitting room is a light, comfortable space, cleverly lit by Sarah with festoon lights strung between the beams. Beyond it is a small bedroom, smartly decorated in shades of white and green, with double doors leading to a glass-roofed shower room tucked under the eaves of the thatched roof and the trees, so you feel as if you are showering in the garden.

The front hall leads past the spiral staircase to the kitchen-dining room at the back, a single large space with picture windows on either side. The kitchen end has a gently vaulted ceiling, making it feel bigger than it is, and the cupboards and island are lined with raw reclaimed-oak planks, which are echoed by the rough-planked table the owners fell in love with and had shipped back from Spain. Sliding glass doors lead to a paved terrace outside, which Butter has edged with nepeta, ferns, woven willow balls and a multi-stemmed crab apple, Malus hupehensis ‘Cardinal’. ‘My brief was to keep it simple – to create a garden that worked with the cottage in both its old and new self,’ Butter says.

Upstairs are three further bedrooms and two bathrooms, one of which connects to the main bedroom via a lobby lined with striped Ikea rugs that Sarah has pinned to the walls, to witty graphic effect. A daughter’s bedroom over the kitchen, by contrast, is lined with a wonderfully blowsy wallpaper from House of Hackney that covers all four walls and most of the sloping ceiling, giving it a nostalgic French-provincial feel. The whole house is an object lesson in bringing a rural cottage up to date without stripping out its soul or falling back on chintzy country-house clichés. No wonder the owners and their children are now spending more time there than they ever have before.

Sarah Delaney Design: sarahdelaneydesign.co.uk
Barnaby Gunning Studio: barnabygunning.com
Butter Wakefield Garden Design: butterwakefield.co.uk

Butter Wakefield is a member of The List by House & Garden, our essential directory of design professionals. See her profile here.