A Journey of Heritage, Renewal and an Intriguing Discovery

It was during the 2019 pandemic when I decided to renovate the upstairs of my little cottage which sits in the grounds of our rural home on the coast. I always felt it was wasted, lying empty in such a peaceful and remote headland. I knew people would love the coastal setting offering a cosy and relaxed escape to unwind in.

My vision was of an empathetic interior style that nodded to the original 400 year old stone building. But also to create something that felt sumptuous which gave guests a feeling of being wrapped in a warming and luxurious wool blanket while gazing out to stormy seas.

The upstairs of the cottage had laid empty with bare, dusty floorboards and dilapidated decor having not been used for many years.

This passage of time had reduced its once homely rooms to cold spaces and forgotten memories.

In the previous few years I had converted two downstairs rooms for us to use as home offices that took our work out of our main home which was the first tentative taste of renovation it saw.

So, with Covid19 taking away my usual interior design work of helping people transform their homes, I picked up a paint scraper, tubs of filler, tins of organic pigmented paint, rollers, brushes, I set to work.

We did minimum building works as I wanted to keep the internal layout and fabric of as much of the cottage the way it was intended.

There was only 1 slight issue that some of the doors were very low, obviously built for people a few hundred years ago when the average height was smaller than us today.

The door frame into the bathroom needed to be made higher so when my handyman took a mallet to remove part of a wall, chunks of wooden wall fell out.

When we looked we found this beautiful pink and green block designed printed wallpaper.

That, right there, became the inspiration for the colour palette of The Pink Cottage.

The cottage exterior was painted a beautiful chalky pink and those beautiful colours from the antique block printed wallpaper appear throughout the interiors.

The bathroom was refurbished in a traditional style to feature a beautiful roll-top bath and underfloor heating to keep your toes toasty.

And I just couldn't resist painting the bath in the wallpaper pink!

As an interior designer, one of the foundations to a home you love is choosing a tight colour palette and knowing how to design rooms that all flow together, each having its own personality.

I often wonder who was the lady who chose that wallpaper all those years ago?

What was her name?

Who did she live here with?

Where did she get the wallpaper and who put it up?

If only the walls could talk!