An 18th-century Cottage in the Yorkshire Dales

 

 

 From House and Garden:

Kitty bought the three-bedroom cottage, which dates to the early 18th century and is typical of the local vernacular, in 2020. ‘It was damp and dilapidated, but I needed a larger studio and wanted to incorporate its garden into my own,’ she explains. In the summer of 2021, with the country reopening after Covid and the restarting of house parties and weekends away, Kitty realised the cottage could have another function. There were, however, budgetary restrictions: ‘We’re a long way from anywhere here, so you don’t throw something away because you don’t like it. Instead, you find a way to make it work.’ Baths and basins were replaced, but the layout was retained – ‘one bedroom and a bathroom are downstairs, but this suits some people’ – along with the kitchen and woodchip wallpaper. ‘Removing it would have been a pain, so we just painted over it,’ she explains.

Then, with a blank slate and Robin staying, the idea arose of using the cottage as a canvas ‘to bring the Dales inside’. ‘There was no plan – it was quite experimental’, he says. ‘One of us would start somewhere, the other would add more – it just evolved.’ Between swims in the river, they used acrylic paints to decorate the walls with grouse moors and boxing hares, imaginatively remapping views so that village houses around the dining room table segue into the Ribblehead Viaduct over the chimneypiece. (Read more.)

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