A former House & Garden decoration editor's elegant, understated Wiltshire cottage

Fifteen years ago, Wendy Harrop (then decoration editor of House & Garden) interviewed me for a job here at the magazine. I told her that I hoped all the other applicants were awful and she gave me the gig. This was typical of Wendy – she has always appreciated a sideways approach. My interiors education could not have been in better hands. Perhaps it was the combined influences of her laid-back Australian upbringing and the time she spent cutting her teeth as the creative director of The World of Interiors, but Wendy’s eye introduced me to ways of seeing that were elegant, simple and completely original.

She and her husband, fellow Australian Mel Nichols, bought this Wiltshire cottage nearly 30 years ago. At the time, they were living in London with their young daughter, Georgia, and were keen to find somewhere to spend weekends. For Mel, the Wiltshire countryside felt a lot like his native Tasmania, with its soft, rolling landscape and dotted farms. ‘Growing up, everybody had a shack where they’d go for the weekend,’ he explains. They found the tiny cottage by chance while exploring in the car one day. ‘With its low thatch, it looked like a little loaf of bread that had risen out of the ground,’ Wendy recalls fondly.

The surroundings are almost mythical. Like Stonehenge and the Avebury stone circles, the cottage is built from sarsen stone and it sits demurely on the edge of the 1,000-acre West Woods, which are bisected by the mysterious Wansdyke, a series of early medieval earthworks. ‘It felt as though the cottage was embedded in this historical, ancient landscape,’ Mel says. Back then, Wendy was a self-confessed city girl and had little experience of the country. An early weekend at the cottage was spent digging up more than 100 weeds from the garden and lovingly replanting them in a bed. Once she realised her mistake, she ‘just bought loads of books and learnt’. Now the garden is planted beautifully with hummocks of lavender – a hardy variety from Downderry Nursery in Kent – and borders of tall, airy, palest yellow giant scabious (Cephalaria gigantea), milky bellflower (Campanula lactiflora) and foxgloves. ‘It’s all typically Wendy,’ says Mel. Their holidays are all spent at the cottage: they describe idyllic weeks with neighbours and friends, long summers eating outside and lying in the hammock or picking raspberries, walks through snow-covered woods in winter and rustic Christmas celebrations.

If London was all about decision making, life in the country has been the opposite – if anything the cottage is anti-decorating and little has changed over the years. With just two bedrooms upstairs and a sitting room and kitchen downstairs, it was never a big project. Wendy was confronted with fabric and furniture choices all week at work, but her schemes here are a tribute to simplicity.

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After ditching the horseshoes and dark beams left by the previous owner, Wendy brought in a wash of light. The wonderful bumpy walls and beams throughout are painted in four tones of ‘Cotton’ from Paint & Paper Library. ‘It feels like a Mediterranean house – something you might find in Puglia – with its rough walls, and upstairs the ceilings seem so high,’ Wendy remarks. She designed an elegant lantern for the stairwell and made candle sconces from galvanised metal scoops for the sitting room.

Since her retirement from House & Garden in 2010, Wendy has spent much of her time painting, and many of her works – along with those of friends – hang from walls or are propped up on tables. An L-shaped Ikea sofa in the sitting room has washable covers in plain white cotton, with hand-printed cushions made by Wendy. Otherwise, what she describes as ‘scrappy’ painted antique furniture was mostly bought from a local dealer who has since retired. There is an art to such restraint – the feeling throughout the house is charming and pretty, but never twee.

When they first moved in, Wendy describes the overwhelming sensation of joy on waking up in the cottage on a Saturday morning and reaching for the headboard with closed eyes to confirm they were not in London. ‘It is total heaven not having to worry about a dirty floor or what you’re wearing. I love it here – it’s so low maintenance. It’s a very unprecious sort of place’.