Interiors

The living room alone is filled with countless examples of Kaffe’s work, set against the most enchanting mural, which fills the entire end wall

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

A collection of postcards, artwork, pottery and found objects is arranged on a chest in the drawing room; the kitchen extension is a stunning, light filled room with a vaulted ceiling up to the roof

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...

Nick and Bella have opened up a new entrance from the kitchen to the drawing room

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...

Next door to the kitchen, in a room that was once the dining room, a whole wall is covered with white built-in shelving filled with tins and jars, teapots, crockery, candles and glasses

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...

James has worked the house’s new interior around many of the original 60s features. “It’s such a different style for me,” he says, “and it took me right out of my comfort zone, finding things for this house.”

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...

The Walled Garden is essentially three spaces – two conjoined rectangular glass pavilions, one behind the other. Visitors approach between two shallow pools, strategically placed to reflect the glass portion of the building, day and night

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...

Focal point of the drawing room is a vast inglenook with an antique pine surround and an elegant stone fireplace set within

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...

The simple, calm tones of Farrow & Ball Light Grey complement the Shiraz rug and four poster in the master bedroom

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...

In the dining room, pride of place goes to the 1960s in the shape of a slim and elegant dining table over which hang a pair of old industrial lights from an antique shop in Hastings. Behind it is a wonderful ’60s Dutch Rippen upright piano

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...

In the front reception room there’s an eye-catching patterned sofa and matching armchair in striking brown and fuschia pink. Harmony has been achieved between pink and brown using accent colours for cushions and other details, so the garish pink becomes opulent and tasteful, and now gives the room an exotic, but cultured air

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...

In contrast to the kitchen, the restrained colour-palette of the drawing room is complemented by pops of colour in the form of ‘Yolanda’ a pink standard lamp created by Oeda, oriental carpeting and a cherry-red sofa and curtains

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...

In the corner of the sitting room a window frames the honeysuckled steps that lead up to the garden, creating a natural picture of its own

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...

Focal point of the dining room is an impressive inglenook fireplace. Candles, hidden in the ledges and alcoves, add a relaxed amber glow to the room

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...

A glossy piano black coffee table stands in the centre of the spacious drawing room between the three sofas

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...

Claire’s kitchen is light and warm in tone, with ivory painted kitchen units and a pale limestone floor. The walls are painted pebble grey and there are panels of a flamboyant, Cole & Son pink flamingo wallpaper

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...

In the kitchen, a collection of vintage school and bentwood chairs are gathered around a long, narrow, scrubbed wooden refectory table

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...

In the drawing room two lovely bespoke sofas made by Jonathan Martin in Brighton frame a cutdown and distressed former kitchen pine table now given a new lease of life as a coffee table

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...

The large reception hall and dining room features a handsome marble fire surround, a marble bust on a tall plinth and a pair of marble-topped tables and walls painted in Pink Ground by Farrow & Ball

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...

A long refectory table has mismatch chairs along one side and a bench on the other.

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...

harlotte’s flat’s main reception room is subtly divided into a sitting and dining room merely by the arrangement of furniture

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...

The drawing room features a Stevenson Brothers rocking horse

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...

Inside the hallway the plaster between several timber supports has been removed and replaced with glass, so that you can see right through and as far as the French windows that lead into the garden from the kitchen at the rear

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...

In the spacious study green French shutters have been used as cupboard doors. Where pipes have been ‘boxed in’ seats have been created

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.

Mosaic Artist’s Home

Second-generation artist-craftsmen are not common in the 21st century, but mosaic artist, Oliver Budd is just such a rarity, and although he fulfils commissions as far away as Oman, his extraordinary creations are designed and made from a quiet village...

Restoration Dream

A move to the country from London can sometimes make an interesting career a little more difficult for some professions at least. Job opportunities for Art Historians (of the university academic variety) are not to be found in many villages...

The snug on the first floor is home to some of the fabrics that Laura can’t resist accumulating

Laura Oakes’ Vibrant Home

It is said that to be creative one must have an inner life, a kind of storehouse of impressions, ideas and feelings to draw upon and reinterpret. That notion certainly seems appropriate to Laura Oakes an artist and designer who...

The spacious open plan sitting, dining and kitchen area

Heritage at Home

For some people demolishing any period cottage is heresy, a loss of irreplaceable national heritage, and, certainly, serious questions must always be asked before swinging the wrecker’s ball.

The dining room table, surrounded by Edwardian oak chairs that were inherited from Mary’s family, is exceptionally generously proportioned and testifies to the couple’s love of large, sociable gatherings

A Snapshot of Family Life

It’s a slightly odd feeling to be writing about a house that belongs to someone who is normally occupied with photographing other people’s. David Merewether is the Wealden Times’ photographer at large and the sort of man who quietly charms...

The living room, that also incorporates the kitchen and a dining area, is truly vast, soaring up past huge white-painted beams to the pitched roof. On one side the walls are of bare brick and on the other of age-damaged render

Artist’s Impression

In Victorian times, Britain was a manufacturing colossus, the workshop of the world. A new architecture was born, the architecture of the machine. Strength and space were the new priorities but the Victorians were, of course, never above a little...

Photo Perfect

One would never for a moment describe Fuller House in Staplehurst as a mad house but it is certainly a touch on the eccentric side.

Deck the Halls

For some people Christmas comes around all too soon, but for others, it can neither be too soon or too often. Jacquie, or ‘Kitty’ as she is now more commonly known, definitely belongs to the latter category, which is probably...

Sugar and Spice

For some, the idea of a tea party conjures images of a rather staid affair, with matronly ladies sipping Earl Grey while enjoying a slice of Victoria sponge, but Anastasia Hutton-Summers, the founder of Kent Vintage Tea Parties doesn’t exactly...

Life on Mars

I was on Britain’s Best Dish!” says Alastair Fairley with a grin, as he shows me into his kitchen. “I cooked pear and frangipane tart with homemade vanilla ice cream, and John Burton-Race said my ice cream was the best...

Best Kept Secret

There is, tucked away just behind the smart shops of one of the Weald’s most attractive towns, an extraordinary little secret street – ancient cobbles, weatherboard cottages tumbling with flowers and, at its end, fields rambling away into distance. Live...

Home Comforts

Arriving at Lucinda Hamilton’s oasthouse, it seems that she can best be found by following the aroma of baking that wafts from the open French windows at the rear.

Photo Finish

There are few more iconic structures in Kent than the oasthouse and fewer more popular farm buildings for conversion to private homes. Ever since the first oast was converted in 1903 at Millar’s Farm in Meopham by Sir Philip Waterlow,...

Softly, Softly

Joanna Osborne and Orlando Gough’s Brighton home is a classic late Regency gem. Icing sugar white with a wrought-iron and zinc fan-like canopy over its upper ground floor bow window and balcony, its decorative flourishes epitomise the early 19th century...

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