Country Cottages

Building a new house in the Scottish Borders enabled artist Sue Phipps to capture the best light for painting, and add character with architectural details and her curiosities

No ordinary restoration project, this previously neglected 18th-century cottage in the Yorkshire Dales has been turned into a living canvas and rural retreat by its artist owner Kitty North and her friend Robin Lucas

In an extract from Ros Byam Shaw's new book ‘Perfect English Small and Beautiful’, the author explores Libby Lord's charming cottage, a ‘decorative tasting menu of delights’ influenced by the quaint atmosphere of its Shropshire surroundings

The cottage has been gradually reconfigured over the past 30 years by a creative couple to provide a versatile home, cleverly adapted to accommodate their evolving work and family requirements

On the edge of a Gloucestershire meadow sits a tiny barn filled with varied treasures collected by the antique dealer and designer Christopher Howe.

Leaving London for the Sussex countryside, Anna Phillips and her husband Jeff Kightly transformed this unremarkable Victorian cottage into a characterful family home, painting it in organic, earthy colours and adding texture with salvaged pieces

Taking Rothko's art as her inspiration, artist Sussy Cazalet has turned her coastal house into a colourful delight of reds and pinks

Dorian Bowen’s sensitive restoration of a dilapidated 18^th-century hand-built rural farmstead acts as a living testimony to age-old Welsh architecture and simpler times

Deep in the Mendip Hills, garden designer Sean Pritchard has turned a labourer's dwelling into a charming home

In an idyllic corner of Sussex, Milli Proust and Ted Dwane are pursuing their twin passions of floristry and cider making, growing their own cut flowers and apples in several meadows around their 17th-century cottage

Some eye-catching interior design alchemy by Nadine Finnegan has transformed a charming old Oxfordshire property into a colourful and characterful family home

20 years of owning this fairytale cottage have made it into a beguiling blend of perfectly preserved English tradition and Central Asian colour and pattern

Tasked with combining two 18th-century cottages to create a coherent property, architect Kathryn Manning devised a contemporary extension to join them, while designer Anna Haines introduced a harmonious mix of colours, set off by antique and bespoke furniture

Antiques dealer Adam Bentley took on the 17th-century stone cottage adjoining his childhood home in West Yorkshire almost 20 years ago, sensitively and thoroughly overhauling it before filling it with an ever-changing mix of pieces

With her signature approach to layering and clever use of colour, Lucy Cunningham has injected personality into her idyllic cottage

Having found this tiny cottage in Oxfordshire five years ago, Victoria Barker has reversed the effects of a characterless renovation to create an irresistibly pretty interior

Drawn to this cottage in the Cotswolds by the charming additions made by its previous interior-designer owner, the current custodian was keen to make her own mark with a sympathetic extension and interiors that reflect elements of her life in Portugal and her Scandinavian roots

For the owners of a lighting company Urban Electric, home is Charleston but their weekend cottage is where the heart is. With the help of Kate Towill of Basic Projects, they've created a charming retreat

Ceramicist Steve Harrison works from pared-back studios in London and Wales, where minimal concessions to modern life create the conditions that ground him

When interior designer Lucinda Griffith fell for a cottage that took her back to her Welsh heritage but was almost beyond her means, she cleverly employed all the tricks of her trade to furnish it in a thrifty, inventive and charmingly inviting fashion