Inside 8 of the best English country kitchens

[upbeat jazz music]

[Alexandra] The kitchen is the heart, I think of any home.

It's very cheerful,

it's a bit like living inside the middle of an egg yolk.

You dump everything here, and you don't worry about it

until the following day in the morning.

[Blanche] Being able to just turn from your prep area

to the stove is so useful.

[mellow jazz music]

So as with many kitchens, this is the heart of the house,

it sits between the living room and a snug room,

and it's just lovely that everyone can kind of meet

in the middle,

that if someone's over there and I'm making some food here,

you can have a conversation and it's all very communal.

I love sitting around with lots of people.

The table itself is so beautiful that it's so aged

and has lots of patina in it,

and it's just a great place to prep

and get ready for a lovely evening.

Scott and I wanted to bring quite a lot of texture

into the kitchen, just as a theme through the whole house.

And I found this beautiful kind of butter sink

at a reclamation yard,

so it kind of started with the process of that.

And then we looked at this poured concrete, which I love

because it just anchors the whole kitchen.

And then we added the aged reclamation wood,

which gave everything just such a beautiful texture.

And then we have lovely open shelves and paintings

just to make it feel more like a room,

rather than a kind of all singing, all dancing,

lots of appliances kitchen.

The red quarry tiles are traditionally used

in houses in Norfolk, but I wanted to use them up here

because I spent a lot of time in my childhood in Norfolk,

so it was a very personal reminder of the kitchen floors

I used to see up there.

And I just love the color here, it's so pretty.

[lively jazz music]

The kitchen is the heart, I think of any home,

especially when you have children.

This is just the most wonderful table

for having people to dinner,

and I've had lots and lots of dinner parties,

or supper parties.

And we were really lucky

that it had this lovely stone flight floor already,

so that's absolutely great.

I found these wonderful old dove tiles,

so that's like a tiny little concession to practicality

so it doesn't splash all over the wall,

decoration should always come first,

and I continue that through the kitchen.

I put all the dogs together.

I've got these lovely wood carvings that I've collected.

Then I found that this is like an old glass lampshade

under here, I dunno how, but it got cracked,

and so then I got someone to make this

and add it on, which I love.

We did have a lovely plum tree,

but it blew down half after the storm,

and we used to use the ladder to pick all the plums,

but I've now got a son who's mad about making things,

so he's often using that.

During the flood, the alcove stove got damaged

and it was an oil one,

so then I was able to get rid of the oil tank

and put in this electric one.

I was very lucky I was able to ask my,

which now became a wonderful friend,

Emma Burns of Sybil Colefax to help me.

And she came up with a design for the new unit,

and it was brilliant.

I always say, this cottage, it's super modern

in terms of comfort, but you know,

you wouldn't really see that,

and it just feels like it's lots of antiques

and lovely things that I love.

[lively jazz music continues]

I love making cakes, and I've always made loads of cakes,

but I have never been able to ice like Maria.

[tranquil music]

This is the room we live in most of the time,

I'd say that.

I sort of spend most of my life

working at the kitchen table.

And we've got the sofa at the end,

which is very much now the home of the dogs,

as well as Charlie and I.

We just went bright yellow,

high gloss,

and it's a bit like living inside the middle of an egg yolk,

it's kind of, [chuckles]

even on the grayest day, it's very cheerful.

and so you come down in the morning

and it is a happy space to be in.

It's probably the least kind of fitted kitchen

that you could imagine.

When I got here,

there was just this fantastic array of cupboards.

It's like a kind of messy old shoe.

The China collection, which grows and grows and grows,

it just goes on and on.

And so the pots and pans, it's an addiction,

and we can't quite stop it,

but I guess it's a healthy addiction in a way.

That I've got a real passion for typography,

in particular for letterpress printing,

and if I see it somewhere, I can't resist an old poster.

This is our wedding invitation,

entertainment and live camels.

So that was our wedding party invitation,

which was designed by me, in fact.

[lively upbeat music]

This is the perennially warm room in the house.

It is useful not just for cooking,

but as you can see as well, it is absolutely handy

for very cold whippets.

When I designed this kitchen,

and what I tend to do when I design kitchens,

I tend to play with colors,

so we can actually make a differentiation

between different parts of the kitchen,

and it doesn't feel so monotonously

like a big block of color.

Proportions are key when designing a room,

and this little dresser is one of the very examples,

it is a Wells canopy dresser.

And this part of the house is what I call the cottage rooms,

the ceilings are much lower.

The important aspect of this dresser is that it's very low,

and therefore it has to be a little bit narrower.

Another thing that I've very much into

is Staffordshire pottery, 19th century,

these particular hens, which are really bold,

and they have the face of a perpetually surprised hen.

And these wonderful Prince of Wales,

which I adore the colors in particular.

For me, they're absolutely essential

for an English country look.

Another thing that I am very much into collecting

is mochaware, 18 and 19th century mochaware.

They were used to serve pints in pubs, effectively.

Originally I started sort of gathering them on eBay,

and they were very, very easy to find.

These days, they're ridiculously expensive,

so I think I have to move to a different type of pursuit.

[lively upbeat music continues]

This is our pantry or utility room,

and it is the most useful room in the house,

particularly if you like entertaining.

You can prepare things here, you can hold all your food,

it's very easy and it's very comfortable.

But the reason why it's incredibly useful is

because once you have had dinner, you dump everything here

and you don't worry about it

until the following day in the morning,

which is really wonderful.

It's an incredibly useful room, all the shelves are exposed,

you don't have to have troubles opening doors,

and it's very, very practical.

It's also a very cool house,

we removed all the heatings in here

so all the food can keep a very good room temperature.

[mellow jazz music]

This seemed like the right place for the kitchen to us,

because it had the French doors leading to the garden.

We're in and out with the garden, in and out with the dogs,

going backwards and forwards with the horses,

so everything's just needs to be wipeable,

washable, mopable.

I think a country house kitchen is free standing,

not even units, it's sort of free standard cabinetry.

It's utilitarian, yes, it's a bit sort of Downtown Abbey,

with like the staff quarters, which I quite like.

But, I can't resist a bit of decoration.

And when I see these sorts of tiles, they're antique tiles,

I can't resist something like this.

They're Portuguese, early 1700s,

to me sort of that carpet effect.

The paintings are still life,

which I think are quite appropriate

for sort of kitchen dining space.

The wood-burning stove was here when we arrived,

and it was made by the blacksmith

in the neighboring village.

If I get the fires really going,

it's pretty toasty and warm.

[quirky music]

I love to cook, and I use this space,

I think most of all in the house.

I love this color called Wet Sand by Farrow & Ball.

I prefer a kitchen that has pictures on the walls.

Above the cooker's a painting that I did,

it's based on a trattoria that I love in Rome.

It kind of captures the general hustle and bustle

of a proper home-run Roman kitchen.

My dresser has Staffordshire pottery that I love.

It's got my favorite pottery,

which is Royal Crown Derby unfinished.

It's the Imari pattern

before all of the wild gilding is applied.

It's a country kitchen,

and this is definitely far too grand a piece of furniture

for it, but I think I just about get away with it.

[chuckles]

When I moved in, Matthew had a pew left over

from where he used to have a big barn

where he did his entertaining.

We had a local craftsman cut the bench down,

and fit it quite neatly into this little alcove space.

This came from my mum's house,

I used do school prep at this table,

and it's been with me for quite a long time,

and I still work at it today.

The snakes were a late night impulse after a glass of wine,

and I'm very glad that I did it.

The lobster is one of my favorite purchases,

it came from Lisbon, where I was traveling.

It's a beautiful pottery shop right in the middle of town.

I believe it was cast by about 15 individual pieces

by a guy who is now reaching his late eighties.

When entertaining,

this mini bar come pantry cupboard is my secret weapon,

I think everybody needs a place to dump things out of sight,

and this doubles up absolutely perfectly,

as well as keeping all the nice bottles

of white wine chilled.

[upbeat jazz music]

I love cooking on the alcove,

but I've also got a gas hob and an electric oven.

So I've just got a prep sink

that I bought from Christopher Howe, trying to emulate

what they did with that plain English kitchen at Howe,

where it's nice and high, and it's beautiful and wide,

so I can lay all my vegetables out and clean them in there.

And then on the right is the herb garden,

so I can just pop out

and pick herbs as I need them for my cooking.

I've cooked in a restaurant

where they used to use a lot of copper pots and pans.

I find that they conduct heat really well,

and also they look quite nice when they're just hanging up.

The idea of being able to just turn from your prep area

to the stove is so useful.

I always have a KitchenAid, which I love,

but I don't like having too many gadgets

and accessories on show.

[quirky upbeat music]

Try to save and reuse as much as we could

that we found in the house.

So these kitchen cabinets were like over there,

jammed between these 1970s Formica fitted kitchen units,

and we hauled them out and painted them and moved them,

and give them a sort of second life.

So these are like bedside cabinets from eBay

for about 150 quid.

These are two old French dressers

that probably cost 300 quid each,

that we adjusted the height and put together,

and went to Swanley for the stone corners,

and got a bit of terrazzo for the marble for the top.

And we sort of improvised on a really low budget,

the kitchen that we liked, basically.

We invested more in the paint as the kitchen evolved.

Then one Sunday I said, Rob,

let's turn the clock into a sun.

We just end up basically always.

Painting in the walls, basically.

We just can't help it. [chuckles]

[quirky upbeat music continues and subsides]