A fabulously pretty rectory on the edge of a Dorset village

Friendships and the glories of the Dorset scenery aside, the house proved as attractive as the glimpse of its kitchen promised, accessed up a farm lane, sited on a gentle slope near the church, with cows grazing in a field of buttercups over the garden hedge. It also has the charm of oddity. It is not one house, but two: one medieval; the other dating from the 1830s. The older house comprises the kitchen and next to it four smaller rooms – a larder where once there would have been a staircase, a living room, a study and a utility room. The later house sits directly in front of its older sibling; it is joined to it by a staircase that fills part of the gap between the two.

When you are inside, this peculiarity is not apparent – the only giveaway is a stone mullioned window in the study next to the kitchen, which faces the back wall of the later building. In all other respects, the layout seems perfectly rational. The kitchen is at the back – a big room with a fireplace big enough to house a four-oven Aga and a floor flagged in squares of blue lias stone. Opposite the back door, which leads straight into the kitchen, is another door that opens into a central hall with the staircase rising on the left. Ahead is the front door and on either side are two nicely proportioned rooms: a drawing room and another living room. There is a sense of progression from the vernacular informality of the kitchen to the country classicism of these two rooms at the front.

The building at the front, which dates from the 1830s, has a symmetrical façade.

Simon Upton

Outside, the architectural discrepancy is more obvious. Approaching the house by car, you arrive at the back to see casement windows and the steep pitch of a roof that once supported thatch. Follow the path around the side of the house to its front garden and you are greeted by a façade of Regency symmetry, with sash windows and a door with an arched fanlight. Most of the changes Miranda has made to the house have been to the exterior, including knocking down a modern garage and removing a twentieth-century porch from the back door.

In the drawing room, Little Greene’s ‘Pearl Colour’ provides a backdrop for Miranda’s art collection, including Chard by Binny Mathews, who was born in Dorset. The painting over the mirror is by Fred Cuming. The sofa is covered in ‘Olive Sacking’ by Guy Goodfellow Collection.

Inside, she says, she has done very little structurally. ‘I brought down some favourite bits from London and trawled the amazing antique shops of Bridport to fill the gaps.’ The previous owners were antique dealers and left some of their larger pieces of furniture in place. The unfitted kitchen, with its scrubbed-pine table, is much as it was in that picture. Miranda added some unusual Regency chairs, antique china and a green French garden chair. In the drawing and living rooms at the front of the house, the furniture is her own, including the Sean Cooper sofas. The living room had lost its fireplace, as had the main bedroom, so she found chimneypieces in architectural salvage shops on Golborne Road, W10.

Indulging her ‘very English and traditional’ taste in interior decoration, Miranda has used a selection of pretty printed cottons from UK-based fabric houses, such as Fermoie's ‘Marden’ which covers this ottoman in the drawing room in.

Simon Upton

The main bedroom and bathroom sit at the front of the house, with the spare rooms and second bathroom at the back. For her bedroom curtains, Miranda chose ‘Olander’ embroidered linen from Colefax and Fowler in a darker shade of the duck-egg blue on the walls. The main bathroom’s seaweed wallpaper was designed by her aunt, Min Hogg, the founding editor of The World of Interiors.

Miranda describes her own taste as ‘English and traditional’, but there is originality in her choices – the Guy Goodfellow stripe on the drawing room sofa, for example, is used horizontally – and ample evidence of her eye for colour and for interesting objects. ‘I was influenced by my grandmother, Polly Hogg, whom I adored,’ she says. ‘She used to take me to see gardens and antiques, and to the Victoria & Albert Museum.’ Nicky Haslam described Polly in his memoir as having ‘humour, taste and understated elegance’. Miranda has inherited them all.