Inside Gavin Houghton's tiny ‘playhouse’ of a cottage in Oxfordshire | Design Notes

[birds chirping]

[peaceful piano music]

I've always had a cottage out of London.

Well, for like most of my time I've lived in London

I've always tried to have a cottage out of London.

I think 'cause I was brought up in the country,

I need to get out quite a lot.

But then we have a place in Tangier, in Morocco.

So it's a bit of a juggle,

we spend time at all three.

This is a tiny cottage

and it's very easy to maintain

and we just lock it and go.

As it's a rental, I don't put that much energy into it.

We just have a bit of fun.

It's kind of, it's like a playhouse.

The cottage just being old,

I find it very charming.

All these old picture hasn't been moved.

When we come here and just to see something nice,

and it's quite relaxing and sort of just,

we don't mind cracks on the walls or,

Dogs sitting on everything.

Or little spider, somewhere in a corner,

we just, we want to come here and just enjoy it

and not really care about it.

I've always loved doing interiors

and I was working for magazines for a long time,

but I was always doing my houses on the side,

and I just decided to go full-pelt interior design,

and ceramics, now.

I have a bit of a mish-mash of inspiration.

I've got well, Charleston,

I love the Bloomsbury Group,

but a bit of David Hicks chucked in there,

but then a little bit of Nancy Lancaster,

put it all together.

But, well, I like it to be bit witty, sort of funny,

and I don't like it to be too serious.

Before lockdown, I went to a evening class in Lambeth,

which was for learning to do slab work,

which is when you roll it out like pastry

and you put it into a mold

that you make yourself, outta plaster.

And I went specifically to make plates.

I had this desire to make myself a set of plates.

And I inherited a kiln, can you believe it?

And here are some of the examples.

[jazzy music]

I mean, these are one of the early ones,

which are a sort of Delft,

so classic, and that's made in a mold,

but some of them are made on,

we call them blanks,

they're sort of ready-made plates.

[plate pings]

And I just glaze them, dip them in the glaze,

paint on them, shove them in the kiln.

Couldn't be easier, really.

These are hand-built ones,

these are more slab,

and then I stick on,

well, this one, I did a face.

You can do anything, that's what's so amazing.

And this is done with very thick clay,

which has got, they call it grogged.

It's got sand in it,

so it's quite rough.

This is new, I don't normally do this, but I quite like it.

And I love the mess of glaze, the messier the better.

[jazzy music]

So this is from Christopher Hough,

which is one of my favorite things in the house.

And it's got this brilliant maneuver

so you can access the candle.

I think it's from a church, but I think it's rather genius.

I had to buy it.

And it works perfectly here.

[upbeat jazzy music]

In my work I'm quite known for using green, a lot,

in fabrics, wallpapers, paints.

But for this room, I went this slightly extra mile

and obviously went a bit crazy with this color choice,

but I think it works.

We call it Kermit's sitting room. [laughs]

In the winter, we have a roaring fire

and we entertain a lot in here.

[jazzy music]

So I added this border a couple of years ago

because it just felt a bit, no, I dunno,

the finish wasn't great,

just the green and the white, it was just a bit aggressive.

And I love the Bloomsbury aesthetic.

They look a bit like pearls

but I think it's finished the room off.

So I painted this literally 20 years ago,

maybe even 25 years ago.

I used to get commissions as an art student

to make them.

They're just canvases, stretched,

and I just hinge them together.

But this one I kept for me,

and I quite like green and pink together.

And this is a mirror that I made recently,

which is tiled and inspired by the Bloomsbury again,

that's a prototype.

I quite like a mad combination of fabrics together.

But I'm told that the more fabrics you have together,

the calmer a room is.

If you just have one colored fabric,

it's a bit hotel-ly and a bit static.

But when you add, add, add, add, add

it becomes very peaceful.

I made this cushion.

It's one of the first things I made,

years and years and years ago, and I still love it.

I can't remember, I think I got in an Oxfam or something.

And then I added this fringe.

I still think it's one of the best cushions I have.

And these were here, which are good.

No one knows where they're from,

they're not Colfax, they look like it,

but we dunno where they're from.

But I like the English country chintzy vibe

mixed with checks.

And that chair is totally gigol.

I love the feeling of discovery, you know,

when you look and look and look and look

and you think you're gonna find a masterpiece hidden away.

There's a brilliant shop in Chipping Norton,

I'm not telling you where,

I have to go every weekend, it's very hard.

And I kind of know everything,

and they don't get enough stock changing.

But it's just, it's about going

more than buying, in a way.

That was a lucky find, I think.

I really like him.

I quite like unframed oils,

it just feels very relaxed and casual.

I've got a lot of them, as you can see.

But then, actually, that's one of mine. [chuckles]

[slow jazzy piano music]

So this is our bedroom

which is probably one of the biggest rooms in the house.

I love it.

It's got very good Feng Shui, I think,

I dunno why, I dunno anything about Fen Shui.

But it's very peaceful

and we can hear the birds in the garden.

The dogs love it up here.

So this is a super king bed,

it's just a heaven.

And we spend a lot of time up here.

The lights are nice.

So I've got a bit of a habit of buying pictures.

It's like addiction, I'd say?

There aren't so many here,

but in London there's millions,

but it's growing and growing and growing.

But I keep trying to do my own pictures,

not buy pictures.

So I often buy frames

and then I paint to go in the frame.

And that's Boris, my old Jack Russell.

This is a painting of a doorway in Fez

by a painter called Colin Watson,

which I bought in an exhibition,

he's really good.

That's by me, the children with the mother.

I've always painted,

always, always, always, since I was a child.

I've never been very good, but I just love doing it.

My father went to the Slade,

my mother's a painter.

It's always been in our family, painting, in a way.

[jazzy music]

This is called the Beaton Chair,

this is a double one.

This is the original that I took the design from,

which I found at Portobello, years ago.

[jazzy music]

Come on!

[peaceful music]

So like everything else in this tiny cottage,

we have a tiny little garden,

which is very easy to maintain.

I used to be a gardener

and I was always tired,

so it was nice to come here for weekends

and do nothing, basically. [laughs]

But we've got some nice English roses,

and sage, and sort of,

and I love leaving things to sort of self-seed

and just sort of come out from the gravel.

We got this beautiful man planter,

Gavin got it from the famous junk shop

he loves in Chipping Norton.

We have a girl, who is in London,

and he stays there.

So one day maybe we'll get them together again.

[peaceful piano music]

So when I'm here in the country

I love to sketch and fiddle around with,

these are some splashback designs, tiled splashbacks,

this is a Moroccan-inspired candle thing

I wanna make for the table.

And also I'm designing a bathroom

for my house in Morocco, a fancy bathroom,

really, it's my dream-come-true bathroom.

I don't like interiors to look too labored

and too self-conscious,

they've gotta be a bit relaxed, I guess.

I sleep like a baby here for some reason.

It's very cocoon-like.

It's very small and easy.

The dogs love it.

It's sort of small little gem,

very easy to look after and to share with friends.

[jazzy music]