Our design studio’s latest project, a home on Dartmoor, features in the latest issue of House & Garden.

This Arts and Crafts building has a strong and distinctive character and required a dramatic transformation on a huge scale. The site already had its own hydroelectricity and with no architectural work required our studio worked purely decoratively which was refreshing for us.

“With its stone mullioned windows and roof peaked with gables, there is something of the fantastical about this Dartmoor house. And now the fairy-tale facade is echoed by its interiors, brilliantly conjured into life by architectural salvage experts Maria Speake and Adam Hills of Retrouvius.”

With thanks to Hatta Byng and all at House & Garden, location editor: Liz Elliot, photographer: Martin Morrell, writer Ros Byam Shaw.

Read the full article on the House & Garden website.

In the main living spaces lime wash softens granite walls and heavy stone slabs on the window sills are traded for a waney, wobbly sea oak. The project’s first phase transformation just before the pandemic lockdown allowed us to work with what we already had. Furniture from the Retrouvius warehouse and further afield were sourced to bring tactility. C17th Portuguese, North Italian and Spanish pieces bring a timbered richness alongside African finds.

Textiles became our language of expression. Not purely practical, for keeping out the light or warming a space, they are rich and intricate artworks in themselves. The many bedrooms are furnished to offer safe havens for retreating into and use a broad range of textiles from our collection; Antique Suzani, a Chinese indigo tent fabric, African Kuba and mud cloths, Anatolian flatweaves and vintage Hungarian bed sheets, (naturally dyed using walnuts).

The surrounding gardens soften the weight of the main house with lawns left to grow freely and seeded with native wild flowers.