Interiors
Flamboyant and Creative Seaside Family Home
Carmel and Mick have transformed their seaside home into a flamboyant and creative space perfect for their family to pursue their musical talents.
Georgian Farmhouse Transformed into Colourful Family Home
Much is written of the Georgian house – its perfect proportions, its soaring rooms, its windows that allow light to flood into every nook and cranny.
Humble Garage to Gorgeous Guesthouse
Converting a building that was never designed for human habitation into an attractive home can be a rewarding challenge.
Medieval Hall House
The most iconic building in the Weald is, of course, the oast and it’s understandable that, once their commercial lives had come to an end, so many were converted into family homes.
Stunning Renovation
The drawing room was probably once the pub’s main room. One wall has been stripped back to the sandstone and brick and in the old fireplace stands a lovely antique Godin stove
Heritage Conversion Success Story
Taking a building that has lain derelict or neglected for decades, perhaps centuries, and breathing new life into old stone and brick can be a hugely rewarding experience.
Victorian Townhouse Doubles As Antique Showroom
An American catching sight of a friend’s particularly fine painting, sculpture or piece of furniture would have no hesitation in paying the appropriate compliment and casually adding ‘Waddyagiveforit?’
Renovated Period Cottage
Renovating a period cottage is always a challenge. The lives we lead are very different both from those of the 17th century villagers and farm workers for whom these homes were originally built and from the families who have updated...
Promenade Paradise
There are things in this world that go effortlessly together. Things that seem made for each other. Bagels and cream cheese, Bogey & Bacall, Champagne and caviar, Farrow & Ball – and it’s the same when we walk into one...
Coach House Conversion
Arriving at Alli Williams’s home on the Kent-Sussex border, it’s almost impossible to remember that you’ve come to write about a house and not merely draw up a garden chair, pour yourself a glass of something crisp and white and...
An Enduring Legacy
Decimus Burton was quite a gent. Born in 1800, the son of James Haliburton, one of the most significant builders of Georgian London, he studied under John Nash and designed his first major public building – Colosseum in Regent’s Park...
State-of-the-Art Country House Apartment
It’s an impressive approach to David and Louise’s apartment, through large gates and into immaculate country house style grounds. It’s situated on the third floor of a large, elegant block so we take the lift. There are stairs, of course,...
Remodelled Victorian Home
As a six-year-old child, I had just one ambition. Not to be a train driver or super-hero, not to slay dragons and rescue damsels in distress, not to ride into the western sunset with the Lone Ranger
Wow-Factor Wealden New Build
Philippa and Stephen’s new house in East Sussex re-ignites – should it need any re-ignition – the important debate surrounding the question of how and what should we in the Weald be building for the future
Kitsch & Chic Family Home
Hannah Gee’s house is set back from the road, much further back than all the others, hanging back, in case anyone notices that it doesn’t look like the rest, that it isn’t a period house
17th Century Farmhouse
Stella Hayes initially fell in love with the property's glorious garden. She has gone on to create a beautiful home.
Art Collector’s Inspired Hastings Home
It takes many of us a lifetime to discover that treasure lies closer to home than we think, but when Robert Amstad was trying to find a property to live in a few years ago, he realised that a building...
Boutique Bouquet
Brought up in the tropics, I have never lost my awe of the beautiful chameleon landscape in which I now find myself nor have I lost my admiration for those who work within this landscape to create gardens so at...
Kaffe Fassett’s Colourful Home
Without doubt, a visit to the Hastings home of internationally renowned contemporary craft artist Kaffe Fassett and his partner and studio manager Brandon Mably, would bring joy to even the most downhearted of people
Rural Retreat
It’s a steamy and umbelliferous (as in lots of floaty cow parsley) morning in the Weald as we arrive at Wendy’s secluded house, which is tucked away from view down a narrow leafy lane. We’re warmly greeted with a “Mind...
Walnuts Farm: Film Location and Family Home
There must be those among you that occasionally, in a quiet moment, stroll through your homes and think that, yes, after all the planning, plotting and hard work, you’ve at last got it right – on a good day this...
Delightful Modern Country Cottage
Building new houses in traditional Wealden villages has always been a problem and one with which architects are still grappling today. Just how do you design a home that satisfies the varied needs of a modern family while ensuring it...
60s Themed Seaside Holiday Home
I’m sure we’ve all thought about buying a house by the sea – perhaps after an idyllic holiday, or a bracing walk, even just a drive along the coast. On the morning we visit James Rourke’s house, as the sullen...
Outside In
Less,” famously said architect Mies van der Rohe, “is more.” Arithmetical nonsense, perhaps, or an architectural truth that becomes self-evident when you see, for the first time, either his sublime 1929 Barcelona Pavilion or The Farnsworth House, a retreat he...
A Family Affair
It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values,” once said poet Lawrence Durrell. “You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and...
Georgian Home
When talking about the enduring popularity of Georgian architecture one can bang on endlessly about its classical heritage, its proportion and balance and the strict mathematical rules that govern every detail but the truth is that when we see a...
Artist Karen Birchwood’s Beautiful Home
There is nothing quite like waking up in the morning and mumbling down to breakfast to be greeted by Radio Four at 90 decibels. The dog, in one corner, is chewing thoughtfully through a 240-volt cable while in another your...
Cultural Retreat
At first glance The Cloudesley is an ordinary, if imposing, bed and breakfast establishment, with nothing much to hint that something more exotic lies within. We walk up the path past a whispering curtain of bamboo, over the inauspicious threshold...
Primary Palette Country Cottage
Oeda O’Hara’s cottage appeared on its Wealden village green just in time to see the end of the Boer War, although one has the feeling that this happy event attracted its interest as little as many other world milestones over...
Jessica Zoob’s Joyful Home
There are many times when visiting the houses that we feature in these pages that one is delighted by what one finds. One departs impressed, even inspired. A visit to the home of artist Jessica Zoob, however, is – and...
Town & Country Home
Living the rural dream, yet within walking distance of a vibrant town community are surely mutually exclusive ideas. Paul and his wife Jane certainly thought so, until a 17th century moated property nestling off a busy Wealden High Street, reached...
White Christmas
Steph Virgo’s house is getting dressed early for Christmas and even from the outside, bathed in winter sunshine rather than snow, it looks appropriately festive. The handsome 18th century lodge house with its stucco walls rather resembles a giant Christmas...
Opulent Oast Conversion
Oast conversions are not uncommon in Kent, but few have been as skilfully updated for modern family life as well as Claire Horrell’s. The box edged front garden and sparkling white weatherboard façade hint at a sophisticated approach to country...
A Passion for Arts and Crafts
Part of the great attraction of a town like Rye is that with its ancient walls, cobbled streets and buildings, it seems almost suspended in time, but while many such towns can fall into the trap of becoming rather twee...
Summer Cottage
There are many adjectives that are easily associated with an English country cottage. Cottages are warm, charming, quaint, atmospheric. Light, bright, airy or spacious rarely make it into the top 10 – and yet these are exactly the descriptors that...
Hailsham Grange
Hailsham, in East Sussex, has like most English market towns, seen a number of changes to its building stock over the centuries, but the 15th century St. Mary’s Church still rises above all other newcomers and seems to draw the...
Colonial Style Kentish Home
A house of the New World seems to have sprung up in the Old. Along a meandering Kent lane, a white picket fence is not so unusual, but the huge white weatherboarded house with its wide verandah and shiny corrugated...
Phil Oakley Illuminations’ Home
The old Admiral Benbow in St Leonards used to be one of the roughest pubs on the south coast, regulars exiting the windows as often as the doors. Even today, no longer a pub, it is still perhaps just a...
Life at the Top
Some of the grandest Victorian houses in Hastings and St. Leonards were built on quite a different scale to what we are now used to, so it takes some stamina to reach designer Charlotte Elfdahl’s flat at the very top...
Interior Designs
With hundreds of fabrics, wallpapers, and paint colours to choose from, many of us are confused, perplexed, or out of our depth when it comes to decorating a room. The thought of refurbishing an entire house from top to bottom...
The Siren Sound of the Sea
Camber's Sea Gem is aptly named and a Modernist treasure. It echoes the style of 1930s English seaside architecture but is no imitation or pastiche. The angular forms and spiral outdoor stairs, reminiscent of an ocean liner, have the elegance...
An Agricultural Gem
Converted oasts can be rather like those childhood Christmas presents from Great Aunt Hermione – they look the biz from the outside but inside they are too often architectural socks. Oasts are, after all, industrial buildings built for hops not...
Russian Royalty’s Kent Home
Kent seems a rather unlikely spot for Russian royalty to choose to settle in. Its gently undulating landscape is more likely to be filled with apple orchards than fir or birch forests. But one branch of the Romanov dynasty came...
Ash Cottage
For some reason best known to itself, Ash Cottage has decided to travel the modern world under a modest alias inspired by its 19th century youth. True, it must once have been a cottage but today, in its prime, it’s...
A Darling House
We actually found this house for my husband Richard’s sister and brother-in-law, Hilary and Jeremy,” recalls Moyna Edmondson as she divides up a wonderfully fragrant Italian orange cake that she has just baked. “But they got cold feet and in...
Renovated Retreat
We have loved Rye for a long time,” says Rosemary as she ushers the WT team into her home in the centre of the historic ‘citadel’. “Every year for about 20 years my husband Richard and I came to stay...
The Old Rectory – Hastings B&B
Two years ago I read a piece in the Best Buys column of a Sunday supplement property section about The Old Rectory and admired it then. So how lovely to be able to satisfy one’s curiosity and discover what happened...
Textile Artist’s Beautiful Home
The entrance hall to Nancy Nicholson’s home is enticingly adorned with intriguing objects and ‘finds’. There is a sun-bleached sheep’s skull, an apothecary’s jar filled with shells and several sprigs of dried wild flowers and sea grasses.