A fixer-upper in Southern France decorated by the textile designer Kathryn Ireland

Far from the glitzy glamour of the Côte d'Azur lies a very different southern France. Here, the gently rolling landscape is dotted with working farms, oak forests provide refuge for the plenti-ful wild boar and deer, pretty bastides (fortified villages) sit on hilltops, vineyards swathe the countryside, and markets populated by local producers and growers abound. Here in the Tarn, an hour or so east of Toulouse, there is a rare feeling of a place untouched and slightly lost in time.

Among those fortunate enough to have happened across the region are the Los Angeles-based decorator Kathryn Ireland and myself. We both bought wrecks in the Tarn in the early Nineties for next to nothing and enjoyed the restoration process. A former colleague and friend of Kathryn's, Anne Halsey, began visiting Kathryn with her then-husband Keith and their two children, and was similarly enchanted by this oasis of simple authenticity. 'We would stay in her house several times a year,' Anne recalls. 'It was becoming embarrassing imposing ourselves on her hospitality so often.'

During a trip to the region with two friends on a wintry February day in 2001, Anne unexpectedly stumbled upon what would become her own house. She was there to help her friend Fiona, who was house-hunting, but as they drove up the dirt track from the village, Anne was enamoured. Thankfully, Fiona was not. 'Our other friend Louisa and I looked at each other and said, "Well somebody has to buy it!" ' So after Anne had telephoned her husband, a deal was made with the vendor on the spot.

Not far from the village of Vieux, Las Fenials was, until the mid-nineteenth century, a collection of several buildings with parts dating back to the twelfth or thirteenth century. These would have supported perhaps half a dozen families, who would have farmed the adjacent fields and may well have fed the religious community who lived by the trickling River Vere below. By the time Anne bought it, Las Fenials had long settled into the form of a large main house comprised of a few connected farm buildings and a handful of secondary structures.

While the structure and the size of the rooms were good, the layout was not quite right. And because they wanted the house to be ready for summer, everything had to be done more or less simultaneously. Anne recruited François Lavenir, her brother-in-law and a director of the London-based decorative surfaces workshop Sterling Studios, to design a kitchen in a former barn. Here, large glass double doors were installed on the garden side, with a terrace now used mainly for breakfast and lunch. 'As for the rest of the house, it was more a question of creating bedrooms and bathrooms in the best places,' says Anne. There are now five bedrooms in the main house and three more in the other buildings.

Amid the chaos of rewiring and plumbing, Anne would visit once a fortnight from London - where she was living at the time - to check on developments. And Kathryn was a great help when it came to decorating. Much of the furniture and fabrics (largely from Kathryn's collection) was shipped over from the US. 'In fact, the only room without her designs is the kitchen. Another friend, the fabric designer Sally McQuillan of Raoul Textiles, gave me huge amounts of cloth at an amazing rate because they had screen marks - which you can't really see,' says Anne. Kathryn is also a firm believer that America is where the best beds and mattresses are made. 'She was working on a hotel at the time, so she got us a good deal.'