Interiors
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Air & Space
Widowhood prompted the move here,” says Ro, without much preamble. “I was rattling around in the house I had shared with my husband Geoff and after he died I needed a change.
Vintage Calm
Few find what they want in life right under their noses and some of us have to travel a lifetime and many miles to find what we are looking for.
Artistic Licence
There is no better air than here for work.” Is how John Maynard Keynes described the atmosphere at Tilton House in East Sussex, the country residence that he shared with his wife Lydia for many years.
Real Life Therapy
Ann Edwards opens the door of her East Grinstead late Victorian villa with something of a flourish.
Sleeping Beauty
Gabby Eagar’s house could be viewed as the stuff of dreams or nightmares, depending upon one’s enthusiasm for a ‘project’.
Restored with Love
When a grand house falls into decay, there is rarely any shortage of worthy bodies and individuals to rush to its rescue, lavishing cash and compliments and ensuring it’s saved from the bulldozers
Natural History
Claudine and Robin Cecil’s brick and timber cottage is situated on a twisting East Sussex lane. It sits almost in the centre of an unspoilt valley, surrounded by farmland and small copses of oak and beech.
The Homemade Home
Mandy and Phil Shaw have lived in their East Sussex home for 26 years and in that time, they have transformed it from a fairly anonymous late Victorian semi-detached villa into a space that is the ultimate expression of them...
Continental Chic
If Sevenoaks seems a typical English commuter town, not all its residents are quite so predictable. Candy is really Catharina, but her Dutch parents always called her Candy and it has stuck. Living in the Kent town with her Dutch...
Making History
Lullingstone Castle and its owners the Hart Dyke family have been the subject of several television documentaries and a great deal of press attention in the past decade. Tom Hart Dyke, the son and heir of the present incumbents Guy...
The Old Curiosity Shop
On a rainy winter’s day, a journey across Romney Marshes easily evokes images of Magwitch emerging from the mists to frighten poor Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations.
A Grand Design For Living
Most people who build their own country houses take one of two approaches: either opting for high design and commissioning an architect to create a ‘statement’ house which usually means that it is contemporary in style and quite unlike those...
Let There Be Light
Having spent twenty years living in a huge, draughty and quite dark Tudor pile, Bill and Ingrid knew that their next home would be full of light, warm and cosy!
A House Reformed
Our friends thought we were mad when we moved here,” says Sally Russell as she and her husband Brad show us around their home.
A Towering Achievement
Anyone who knows Tenterden will know The Tower House. One of the Georgian lovelies that line the east end of the High Street, the building was so named because the classically fronted square doll’s house of a residence also sports...
East/West Home’s Best
When Phil Russell’s job brought him back to London after 18 years of living and working in Tokyo and Hong Kong, he had only a short time to find his family a new home in England.
Back Home
Coming back ‘home’ to the Weald has been good. It righted a lot of the wrongs,” Louise Dean tells me after just a few minutes’ acquaintance. She has a disarming, if not slightly unnerving, frankness of manner that perhaps comes...
Designed for Living
There are some period houses that seem, over the centuries, to have drawn the short straw. Time and again, caring, loving, well-meaning owners have extended and modernised, re-decorated and re-furnished with such breathtaking insensitivity that immediately one steps through the...
At Home With Style
Glamour” is not a word usually associated with the country cottage, but Andrew Fionda’s home is rather different.
Room With A View
Finding the right house has never been easy. Typically, it means kissing swampfuls of frogs before one finally compromises, moves in and, with a little or a great deal of TLC, ultimately coaxes out the promised prince.
Natural Gallery
Generally, the mention of an old mill house conjures up idyllic pastoral images of ancient millstones grinding corn trundled to the doors in brimming cartloads from surrounding golden fields – a sort of Constable-Hovis hybrid seasoned with a little Vaughan...
Grand Dutchy
Having rung the bell at Sarnia’s cottage, seemingly without result, I am beginning to wonder whether I have made a mistake about our appointment
Micro Chic, Eco Style
It’s hard to believe that Claire Potter’s grade II listed cottage in Portslade, on the outskirts of Brighton, is just a slice off the house next door “We think it must have been the kitchen,” she explains, “as there’s a...
Photographer’s Home and Studio
Photographer Mel Smith and his wife Lizzie have created the perfect work life balance in the idyllic Kent countryside
Ship Shape
Sophie and Jason both confess to having led nomadic lives until they met. A former divorce lawyer and ski instructor, Sophie is now a massage therapist and reflexologist, working in London, Sussex, and Kent, visiting clients in their own homes.
